Cherokees Plant Seeds for Profits : Oklahoma Tribe Has Big Plans for Nursery Venture
What started out in 1979 as a vocational training school for Cherokee Indians today is one of the largest nurseries in Oklahoma.
So successful was the school here in Tahlequah, capital of the 60,000-member Cherokee Nation, that, after two years of operation, school officials decided to close out the program, hire the top graduates and go into the plant business, according to the school’s founder and general manager, Bob Hathaway.
In 1981, its first year, Cherokee Gardens turned a profit of $17,000 on sales of $200,000. By last year, profits had swelled to $121,000 on sales of $741,000, said Hathaway, now general manager of the nursery.
Cherokee Gardens raises 700 different types of indoor and outdoor plants and flowers in 44 large greenhouses and sells to garden centers, floral shops, wholesale brokers and landscape nurseries in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, Illinois and Michigan. It opened its first retail store a year ago and has plans for several more.
The operation has 60 year-round employees, almost entirely Cherokees and graduates of the vocational training school, and an annual payroll of almost $500,000, Hathaway said.
“This fits ideally into the tribal goal of self-determination for our people,” said Hathaway, 41, a Cherokee who earned a doctorate degree in horticulture at Oklahoma State University. He is a great-great-great-grandnephew of John Ross, the tribal chief who led the Cherokees to the Oklahoma Territory in the 19th Century.
“People talk about how fast we’re growing,” he said. “We’re just getting our feet off the ground. This is but the tip of the iceberg.”
Hathaway said his goal is to open 17 full-service garden centers in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kansas, with the wholesale operation feeding the retail outlets.
The retail store in Tahlequah did more than $300,000 in sales in its first year, and Hathaway said he expects it to be doing at least $1 million annually within the next two years.
He noted that appreciation for flowers, trees and horticultural products in general are much greater on the East and West Coasts than in Middle America.
“People do a lot more landscaping--are much more interested in flowers, for example--in California than in Oklahoma, Kansas or Arkansas,” he said.
“But I think we’ve come into this (business) at the right moment. There should be tremendous opportunities in market expansion in this part of the country for the nursery industry. I don’t think it necessarily means that the different nurseries will be competing for the same dollar. It means a whole new market,” he said.
