An audience of about 25 listened raptly on an early summer evening as Red Wagon Plants owner Julie Rubaud spoke about how to draw hummingbirds to the garden. Seated in a large circle on the back patio of the Hinesburg nursery’s bake shop, attendees handed a tiny, finely woven nest from palm to palm as Rubaud talked animatedly.
Salvia, she said, have “nice long necks” perfectly shaped for the ruby-throated birds’ long, nectar-seeking tongues. “Their tongues go in and out like 13 times a second,” she said. “It’s just whacked, just astounding.”
For more than an hour, Rubaud, 55, enthusiastically described plants and offered tips for creating hummingbird magnets with as few as one pot on a balcony. She guided participants — who had each paid $30 for the workshop, including light refreshments and a $5 coupon — through a living catalog of varieties in the nursery’s gardens and greenhouses.
Rubaud pointed out “stunning” hyacinth bean vines and “elegantly self-seeding” beardtongue. “I love this plant,” she said fervently of a shade-tolerant upright fuchsia called Gartenmeister.
Workshops are among the wealth of ways customers engage with Rubaud’s 20-year-old operation, which sells — on-site and through about two dozen local retailers — vegetable and herb plants; annual and perennial flowers and shrubs; and herbs, herb salts, vinegars and teas. At its Hinesburg farm, a newly erected building hosts a top-notch bake shop, along with other food and activity pop-ups. The nursery’s annual calendar is packed with nearly 40 educational events, from basket weaving to planning perennial gardens.
On a recent busy Saturday, customers flitted between greenhouses and the bake shop, which serves fresh breakfast sandwiches, salads, and excellent house-baked pastries and breads, such as pistachio-cardamom cookies and dark chocolate sourdough rolls. Children played in the large sand pile and creek, under a box elder pruned especially for climbing.
“These are the two happiest places to go shopping: a nursery and a bakery,” Linda Yih of Shelburne said. “Who is not smiling here?”
Thanks to Rubaud’s warmth, expertise and passion, Red Wagon has narrowed the gap between business and community hub. At its crux is a deep bench of employees who care as much about plants and nature as their boss does.
“She’s got a touch of genius about her,” said hummingbird workshop attendee Clem Nilan, a Burlington resident and longtime customer. Beyond his admiration for Rubaud’s intense work ethic and ability to pinpoint how best to serve gardeners, Nilan underscored Red Wagon’s exceptional service at every level.
“Julie has a gift with people,” Nilan said. “She’s genuine. She’s adept at really communicating.”
Nilan has known Rubaud for more than two decades, from the start of her farming career in Burlington’s Intervale in the mid-1990s. As a University of Vermont senior, she helped with harvests at Diggers’ Mirth Collective Farm. During a year of travel, Rubaud had realized she was drawn to “little farms and community gardens,” she said. “That was what really sparked me.”
Raised in Vermont by French expat parents, Rubaud said she grew up eating from her family’s gardens and learning the value of fresh, simply prepared food through her palate.
“It was my dream to have a multifaceted business that would incorporate food somehow.” Julie Rubaud
Following a career with ski manufacturer Rossignol and then restaurant ownership, her father, Gérard Rubaud, became a beloved local bread baker. When he died in 2018, Rubaud inherited his wooden bread-cooling racks, now used to cure herbs with salt for Red Wagon’s herb salts. His heavy stainless steel Longines watch is always on her wrist. It doesn’t keep time well — probably because of all the soil and water it endures, she noted ruefully — but she wears it anyway.
Her mother, Nane Doll-Peyron, taught French at UVM. Now 86, Doll-Peyron still helps fold all the nursery’s to-go plant boxes — “thousands and thousands of them,” Rubaud said.
The business that became Red Wagon grew out of a side gig. After deciding to forgo philosophy graduate studies, Rubaud worked for six years at Diggers’ Mirth. The farm had a stand at the Burlington Farmers Market, but early in the season, when vegetables were scarce, Rubaud sold herb plants in clay pots from a folding table.
From the beginning, she distinguished herself by offering uncommon herbs like those her parents had grown, such as chervil, recalled customer Alexandra Lehmann of Charlotte. “She was a little bit different and always so warm,” Lehmann said.
After Rubaud bought land in Starksboro in 2000 with her then-partner, fellow Intervale farmer Eric Rozendaal, she was able to expand her sales through nurseries and grocery and hardware stores. “We called it Eric and Julie’s Plants and Produce,” she said. The couple split in 2005; Rubaud kept the plant side of the business and Rozendaal continued with the Starksboro vegetable operation, which he ran as Rockville Market Farm until his untimely death in 2018.
Seeking a new home for her business, Rubaud learned of a parcel for lease on Shelburne Falls Road. There she built her first three greenhouses in 2005. Rubaud and Rozendaal’s daughter, Louissa, then 7, came up with the name Red Wagon after seeing the movie Bewitched with Rubaud and her now-wife, Uli Schygulla.
It will surprise no one who knows Rubaud that she always insisted on staying to watch the credits, out of respect. At the very end, she recounted, Red Wagon Productions scrolled by, “and Louissa yelled out, ‘Red Wagon Plants!'”
For the first year in Hinesburg, Red Wagon sold plants only wholesale. But, Rubaud said, “People kept driving by and saying, ‘Oh, I buy your plants at Healthy Living. Can I buy them here?'”
The business has grown slowly but steadily, adding greenhouses — there are now 12. After supplementing her income for years with off-farm jobs, Rubaud said Red Wagon is now on firm financial footing. Success means she can pay her employees well, donate thousands of plants to local nonprofits and invest in Red Wagon.
In 2021, Rubaud bought 30 acres across the road. A year later, she was able to buy the farm’s original five acres and finance her first year-round building. It houses a full commercial kitchen, an event space, and a headquarters for the six year-round staffers and two dozen seasonal employees.
“It was my dream to have a multifaceted business that would incorporate food somehow,” Rubaud said.
“She always had this quiet, long-term vision,” said her customer Lehmann, who recalled being impressed when Rubaud revealed that she enjoyed “sitting with the numbers.”
For her legions of devoted customers, Red Wagon is about the variety of plants, most of them grown from seed at the nursery, as well as the expert counsel they can expect from staff.
Red Wagon excels particularly in its herb and vegetable selection, Rubaud said, noting that her core mission has always been to teach and encourage people “to grow your own food and do it well.” Where else, she asked rhetorically, can one find the traditional Mexican herbs pápalo and epazote? Gardeners can also pick up seven kinds of thyme, six kinds of rosemary, 70-some tomato varieties and 48 peppers — from small, sweet, golden Le Petit Marseillais to the thick-skinned Italian heirloom called Giant Marconi.
But Rubaud knows Vermonters love their flowers, too, which the nursery produces in abundance through the summer for succession planting. In July and August, she said, Red Wagon has new batches of zinnia, cosmos and a harvest sheaf of black-eyed Susan varieties in shades of gold, yellow and bronze. Late summer is a good time for planting perennials and refreshing planters with heat-tolerant annuals such as lantana, euphorbia and salvia — for the hummingbirds!
During the hummingbird workshop, Rubaud led the group to a corner outside the greenhouse where a sign read, “First Year Perennials: budget friendly, plant en masse.” The collection — which included spiky flowered wild bergamot, foxglove beardtongue with white cupped blooms and feathery Culver’s root — is grown from seed by employee Chad Donovan, who has a deep interest in native meadow ecosystems.
One of her goals with the workshops is to help gardeners “see the easy-to-miss plants,” Rubaud said. Those are often eclipsed by what she described with sly humor as the showier “tits and ass” varieties, many bred for big, bright blooms that earn royalties for their corporate engineers.
“Help me fight the system,” she entreated her audience, who lapped it up as eagerly as hummingbirds sucking nectar from bee balm.
Red Wagon Plants, 2408 Shelburne Falls Rd., Hinesburg, 482-4060, redwagonplants.com. Open daily through September 28, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. The bake shop now has reduced summer hours and scheduled breaks; check website for updates.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Grow Pro | In Hinesburg, Julie Rubaud has nurtured Red Wagon Plants into a thriving business and community hub”
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Nest — Summer 2025
This article appears in Nest — Summer 2025.
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