Store owner is artist and entrepreneur in one

At age 8, Ben Busko took a bunch of greeting cards he designed to the Bronx Botanical Gardens. Officials there bought the cards Busko made at his Setauket home and ordered even more.

"I was very assertive," Busko said.

Now 26, Busko owns Ben's Garden stores in Oyster Bay and Huntington village that sell his greeting cards and other items -- handmade découpage artworks he and a team of artists working for him in Oyster Bay make, including glass plates, trays, clocks, vases and lamps. The trays carry inscriptions, from Teddy Roosevelt or Ralph Waldo Emerson, or photographs of a family or a pet.

Busko never went to college. "But I'd like to, one day," he said last week. He seems to be doing well enough; there are plans to open two similar stores -- in Brooklyn and Manhattan -- next year.

In high school, Busko published a gardening magazine and had it distributed at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. As a teenager he organized other youths to work with him designing cards and other items. "I'd get the pizza," he said.

Busko is evidence that one can be an artist and an entrepreneur.

He opened the Huntington store two years ago, on the site of the first post office in the village, completely restoring and renovating the place. He has had a studio in Oyster Bay for the past five years and employs about 16 people. He designs the prototypes for much of what is in the store. Other work he buys from artists. "We look high and low," Busko said.

So, is he done now? Not exactly. "I'd like to have 200" stores, he said. The art and the entrepreneurship fuel him.

"It's just what I love," Busko said. "I didn't have a choice."