Lake View Terrace Land Sold for Apartments : Blossoming Buildings Shut Flower Farm

While flower shops everywhere are bursting with Valentine’s Day color and activity, the shelves in a little roadside flower stand in Lake View Terrace are nearly empty, and owner Mamoru Tashima is quietly packing up his pots of chrysanthemums and carnations.

After 32 years in business, Sunnyslope Mum Gardens, a flower farm and roadside stand at Foothill Boulevard and Osborne Street known for it’s inexpensive, fresh-cut flowers and it’s fall mum show, is closing.

Tashima, 40, has sold five acres to a developer who is going to build 116 apartment units on the earth that for three decades has been used to grow calendulas, carnations and hundreds of varieties of chrysanthemums.

“They are calling it progress, but I don’t think it is progress myself,” Tashima said.

“I didn’t intend to sell. They made me a good offer and I took it. I almost had to--there’s apartments all around me. This is no place for a flower farmer anymore.”

Tashima’s father purchased the land in 1953. Then, they had a thriving mail-order business and shipped chrysanthemums throughout the country. Tashima continued the business after his father’s death in 1976.

When Sunnyslope shuts next month, only three farmers will be growing flowers in the San Fernando Valley for commercial sale, said Harold Miller, an inspector for the Los Angeles County Agricultural Commission. Twenty years ago, he said, there were 15.

“The land is more valuable than the business now,” Miller said.

Although Tashima said the flower business made him just enough money to live on, he seems unexcited about the sale price of the land--$1 million.

“Some people say I got taken; others said I got a good price,” Tashima said. “I think I got a fair price. I’m not going to have to worry about finances anymore, but I’ve never been too concerned with making money. I’m not too ambitious. I’ll take some time off, go fishing. But now I got no flowers and no people.”

Normally on Valentine’s Day, Tashima’s flower buckets would be filled with hearty $1.50 and $2.50 bunches of snapdragons, ranunculuses, carnations, sweet williams and stock, a tall, fragrant stem of blossoms.

In October and December, his modest nursery--the flowers are cultivated under canopies of foggy plastic sheets supported by wooden posts--was brilliant with rows of dozens of varieties of mums.

With the impending sale of his land, however, he did not plant many flowers last summer. And recent rainy, cold weather has made the closing of his roadside flower shack, something of a landmark for passing motorists on Foothill Boulevard, even gloomier.

“It hasn’t been a good week at all. No sun. No blooms,” he said. “It keeps getting colder and colder. What I have been able to cut hasn’t been very good.”

But even a bunch of tightly closed yellow calendulas was pleasing enough for Audrey Christensen, who has been buying Tashima’s flowers for seven years.

“Oh, everything he has is so pretty and fresh; there are usually lots and lots of flowers here. They last a lot longer than a florist’s and cost so much less,” Christensen said. “You should see the mums--just gorgeous. I’m going to miss this place. I just knew it would be going sooner or later.”

Tashima, who lives with his mother in Lake View Terrace, within walking distance of the land, said he will continue to grow carnations and some mums for nurseries on a small hillside plot he owns near his farm. He is unsure whether he will continue the fall mum show.

“I’m too young to retire and too old to look for another job,” Tashima said. “I could become a hobbyist, maybe go work in a nursery. I couldn’t hang on to this forever, although it seems like I almost did.”