Plants, however, remained my first love. I had been content to sell Venus’s-flytraps masquerading as pet plants, but now I wanted something better. I needed a plant with real class, a plant that said you’d arrived just as certainly as a Mercedes or Jaguar in the driveway. I needed the Beverly Hills plant.

Unfortunately for me, G-d is very democratic when it comes to farmers. More or less, you get what you plant. Plant a radish, get a radish. Plant a watermelon, get a watermelon. Plant a rose, get a rose. Radishes, watermelons, and roses, therefore, are as available to the poor as to the affluent—all you need is a seed and a pot. Sure, a kumquat or a kiwi out of season is somewhat of a luxury item, but really, how many people are going to buy a kiwi tree for their living room so their friends and neighbors will think they’ve arrived?

Then I heard about a plant that only the very rich had. A plant that could cost over a thousand dollars each. A plant with real status. The bonsai tree. These dwarf Japanese trees were carefully bred over years, and sometimes generations, to completely resemble their full-sized counterparts. The only difference was that where the natural tree might grow from a seed to be a hundred feet tall or more, the bonsai, subject to continuous pruning and constraint, was allowed to grow to only eighteen inches or less. A full-sized ancient tree you could put on a coffee table. Now, that was class!

There was only one problem. Even in my upscale mode, I specialized in mail-order items that sold for $10 or less. How many lunatics were going to send me $1,000 through the mail for a bonsai tree? I needed a way to reduce costs by better than $990 per item if this idea was going to work. Even volume purchasing wasn’t going to help me here. I needed a better idea. And I got one.

True, there is a big difference between full-grown regular trees and full-grown bonsai trees, due to the special care with which bonsais are raised. But there is absolutely no difference between a regular, newly grown seedling and one that is to become a bonsai tree. All seedlings could be bonsai trees if they were raised that way. It’s just a state of mind. In fact, if you just gave people a little booklet telling them how to raise their seedlings into bonsai trees, anyone could do it (providing they have a few thousand hours to spare, but why bother with details?). Why, with a little booklet, a $2 nursery seedling (wholesale cost 27¢; cost after packaging and mailing, 65¢) was a bonsai tree. You could even tell people what they were getting, but show them a picture of a full-sized bonsai tree in the ad just so they got the idea.

And thus “Baby Bonsai Trees” ($1.99 plus postage and handling), one of the most popular ads in the history of the mail-order business, was born. It’s easy to read those words; it’s difficult to imagine what it meant in reality. Suddenly I was placing ads everywhere, not just in the National Enquirer and Star, but in TV Guide, in Dow Jones publications, in daily newspapers, in Sunday supplements. The country was going bonsai crazy. For just $1.99 and postage and handling ($7.50 for all four varieties offered in the ad; few people took just one), you could have class. Now, that was a bargain!