‘We put in long hours in the days of the ‘20s and ‘30s, and we did not have deliveries from growers’

Frank Antonicelli’s customers urge him to turn his crew loose to water, weed and spray the plants in his Mission Hills Nursery. But at 62, the tanned nursery owner says he can “outpace a 25-year-old.” Besides, old habits die hard. Antonicelli has been watering and tending to the plants at the same site for more than 50 years. He was raised in the house that now holds the retail nursery he inherited nearly 40 years ago. His father and uncle were apprentices to the nursery’s first owner, legendary horticulturist Kate Sessions. Antonicelli will expound on the history surrounding his one-acre site and likes to jaw with old-timers about life when people were building bomb shelters across the street, swimming the river in Mission Valley, or journeying to El Cajon on dirt roads. Looking ahead to a looming water crisis, he worked on committees to lobby elected officials during the Peripheral Canal debate and now hopes local officials will take up the cause. His wife, Elsie, does the books for the nursery, but an Antonicelli won’t be taking over the business when he retires. He hopes one of his five employees will carry on. Times staff writer Nancy Reed interviewed him and Peter McCurdy took his photograph.

Here is the old home. In the olden days, my dad used to make wine in the cellar. I was a youngster and I remember how we would crush the grapes and all in the backyard. Everybody in the neighborhood would know when we were making wine because you could smell the grapes, the sweetness, and the bees would come to it. So they (the neighbors) would be wanting to sample the wine, and he was proud of making the wine. And in those days, the days of Prohibition, the sheriff came out and he told my dad: Close up your winery.

Then, in the building upstairs, he went into making beer. It was fun.

I grew up in this house. Youngsters in Mission Hills used to come down through the nursery and back through it to the school. They would use it as a short cut. Even today, adults show their youngsters how their mommy and daddy would come through the old site here.

I was raised in the business, we were old stock, we kind of followed in the footsteps of Kate Sessions. She did not have any children, and plants were her whole life.

She was a hard individual. When she would go out on a landscape job, rather than put a stake in the ground, she had these high boots on and she’d kick heel marks in the ground and that’s where she would tell the guys to plant the trees.

We put in long hours in the days of the ‘20s and ‘30s, and we did not have deliveries from growers; we had to go to Los Angeles. It was tough. We didn’t have the packaging that we have today.

For instance, fertilizers now come in plastic bags. We had to do our own sacking. Sunday mornings it was my job to sack fertilizer or leaf mold--we had to go to the mountains to get leaf mold. I had a bicycle to get back from school quicker to get to my duties watering. When I went to high school, my dad got me a car so I could get back here faster.

It was a job. It was something you lived with and you accepted it. Nowadays, the new generation, they don’t do things that way, seven days a week.

The arrangement here at the nursery is like a botanical gardens. It is not like a cold cut merchandise store; we try to make it a showplace. We do have a lot of hobbyists in here. We have people who just come here from the retirement homes, and they enjoy this like a park. We share our beauty with many people.

A lot of people envy us nursery people because we work in such a natural environment. Time and time again, we hear this, and it kind of rubs in that we are lucky to be in the horticultural area.

But the industry is changing. We are not getting the professionalism we used to. In Los Angeles, they used to have every known plant in the books--nowadays, there are many varieties in catalogues that you can’t find. The growers want to cut out the rarities, the slow moving plants. We are not growers anymore, we are merchandisers. And growers are cutting corners.

One of the things that we worry about more than anything is the water crisis. We are faced with a future water drought condition. I don’t see a relief in this because the water demands are going to be greater every year, and people are not bringing water with them.

We have plants that have to be watered twice a day. Even on holidays somebody has to be in the yard to water. Plants don’t take a day off.