Following his return from serving overseas, including four and half years as a prisoner of war, Jack took advantage of post-war rehabilitation programmes to learn about the horticulture business and quickly rose to be the shop manager at Waugh's Seed and Plant Shop in Lower Hutt.
He was keen to open his own business and when 15 Queen St came up for sale he took the opportunity to establish himself in what had become the former Kentish family's home turf of Masterton.
The Wallis family (Jack senior, Doris, Jack junior and Janet) lived in the house for the first few years, the front room serving as a store room.
It was a very old house - corrugated iron has been placed over the original shingles on the roof, and the piles had almost disappeared. In fact, the rear of the house was lower than ground level.
It was a true family business. Doris worked alongside Jack in the shop, Jack junior assumed responsibility for watering the plants morning and night, and at the weekend all the family sat around a table to measure, weigh, packet and label seeds.
It was common horticultural practice for a lot of seed - peas, beans, corn, lawn seed - to be bought in bulk and then weighed in-store, using ancient scales. Smaller seeds, or those sold in smaller quantities, such as carrots, were measured with special measuring spoons.
Seeds were then scooped into appropriate packets, often purchased in bulk with coloured photographs on the front, which were sealed, and stamped with the business logo "Garden Pride". Jack junior started working for his father when he left school in 1953. Jack senior joked that his son was the "s" at the end of Wairarapa's Garden Specialists.
The shop opened five days a week from 7am until 5.30pm, except Fridays when hours extended to 9pm. It opened early and closed late, so customers had the opportunity to place orders on their way to work and collect them on their way home.
Jack also gained a large clientele from among the Wairarapa farming community and went the extra mile to source specific plants for customers. When new deliveries arrived, people would be making selections from outside the shop as plants were being unloaded.
The busiest time of the year was always the tomato planting season around Labour weekend, and the following Carterton Show weekend. Three full truckloads of trays of tomatoes, each containing 54 plants, were delivered from Manderson's Nursery in Epuni in Lower Hutt.
In those days seedlings were sold from trays - flats they were called in the trade - and individually dug out at customers' requests. Each had to be gently lifted by trowel, carefully wrapped in a newspaper bundle and secured with a large rubber band - quite a skill in learning, so that no leaf was damaged and no soil escaped.
The rear of the section was used for storing and growing plants. Janet Wallis, later well-known as children's author Janet Bottin, says that she retained her love of plants despite being so exposed to them as a teenager. Her brother Jack also kept his desire for growing plants. He left for an apprenticeship at Robinson's Nursery and was a horticulturist for most of his working life.
When Jack Wallis junior left the business, Jack senior decided it was time to move on. He had become a respected horticultural figure, a member of the New Zealand Nurserymen's Association, and a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Horticulture of New Zealand. He sold the lease of the business to Bill Broad in 1957. Broad operated the business for only three years before he sold the lease to local gardening identity Henry Carle.
Carle was locally born - his mother was the local milliner Madame Carle - and he had been working as an insurance agent for Government Life. His business kept him away from home for many hours in the evening and he decided it would be better if he found a business that he and his wife Dorothy could work together.
Henry Carle was already well-known to local gardeners as he had a weekly recorded garden talk on the local radio station. He was to later be the gardening correspondent for the Wairarapa Times-Age for many years.
Under his ownership the shop became known as Gardencraft and specialised in roses. Henry was a prominent rosarian and an international rose judge. The Carles also employed Jack Wallis niece Megan Carman, continuing a family link to the shop. Following their 13-year stint in the business, the Carles retired and sold the business to a married couple who were a forestry worker and a primary teacher - Dick and Trish Newcombe, who took over in 1973. Dick oversaw a fundamental change in the way the shop was run. He enlarged the display area so it could hold many more trees and shrubs, and erected a modern purpose-built building.
During Dick's time the garden industry underwent huge change. The old five-day a week trading expanded out to Saturday morning and then to seven-day trading. It was also a time of garden centres joining together to form buying groups and Dick was instrumental in the formation of the Greenworld group, and Newcombe's Gardencraft became Newcombe's Greenworld.
Dick and Trish Newcombe retired from the business in 2001, although Dick continued to work on garden design and layout. The shop was taken over by Rod Gully and Fleur Harlick, trading under the name Fleur's Greenworld.
They ran the business until early 2005, when it was taken over by Sean and Katrina McGillicuddy.
They had already started a business further along on the opposite side of the road, specialising in garden irrigation and ornamentation, called Home and Hosed.
When they combined it with the garden centre business, they operated it as Home and Hosed Greenworld.
