At the Ashwood Gardens & Nursery, a family-owned greenhouse and landscaping operation at 11374 Ashcake Road in Hanover County southwest of Ashland, one of its greenhouses has collapsed.
Ashwood’s owners, husband-and-wife team Charlie and Terry Blair, were vacationing in the Caribbean — most of the time on a sailboat amid the British Virgin Islands — when they got a call Saturday that put a chill on their time off.
“Our neighbor, Dan Williams, had been over to our place to feed our goats,” Charlie Blair said by telephone from St. Thomas. “He had seen our greenhouse sagging and wanted us to know.”
The Blairs had left the heat on in the greenhouse — one of two 4,000-square-foot greenhouses at Ashwood — even though there were only a few plants in that one. They’d had no problems with snow since the opened the business in 2002, Blair said.
“Dan cranked the heat up full blast for us,” Blair said. “We walked him through it on the phone. But there was just too much snow.”
