A Growing Market : Region’s Nurseries Hit Jackpot in Vegas
Many of the big diesel trucks that lumbered out of Orange County in the 1950s and ‘60s were loaded with juicy oranges for Midwestern tables and fancy asparagus for New York nightspots.
Nowadays, nursery plants have overtaken foodstuffs as the county’s principal agricultural crop. And more and more of those big trucks are headed for Las Vegas, carting palms, pines and podocarpus for a fast-growing community that prefers to look more Southern California coastal than high desert.
Las Vegans’ taste in trees, shrubs and flowers has been a boon for Southern California’s nursery business, which has been hurt badly by the collapse of the region’s development industry.
Sales of nursery stock have revived in Orange County and Los Angeles County since dropping sharply in the early 1990s. For instance, nursery stock was a $181-million business in Los Angeles County at its peak in 1990. That fell to $145 million in 1993 but has rebounded to about $152 million this year, according to the county. Most of the growth in the past two years has come from sales of landscape plants.
Boething Treeland Farms in Woodland Hills, one of the first nurseries to discover Las Vegas, reports that half its revenue now comes from Nevada’s Clark County.
Russ Kelly, general manager of Bergen Nurseries in Brea, says the desert market has a seemingly insatiable appetite for the large trees that are his specialty.
“We’ve bought eight brand-new, 45-foot trailers in the past year just because of our increased shipments” to developers of Las Vegas resorts, casinos and shopping malls, he said.
The company ships all kinds of trees, but it particularly likes jobs that call for palms. Many sell by the foot, for a lot of money.
In front of Kelly’s office are two Mediterranean fan palms-- Chamaerops humilis --that are about 70 years old. He figures the two multi-trunk trees, purchased by an outside broker from a private residence in Huntington Beach earlier this year for “what I’d guess was about $1,500 at current prices,” have a resale value of $30,000 in La Vegas.
“They are destined for one of the hotels on the Strip,” he said.
The typical palm does not fetch quite that premium, but they are up to 10 times more costly than broad-leafed trees sold in the Vegas market.
Bergen now devotes most of its 95-acre Redlands growing grounds, and all of its 35-acre hot-weather growing area in Thermal, to trees for Vegas and other desert communities.
“That’s where the growth is,” Kelly said. “It sure hasn’t been in Southern California.”
In 1985, Clark County, Nev., had a population of 583,079. By 1990, immigrants to the county seat, Las Vegas, and surrounding areas had swelled the number by a hefty 27% to 741,459. But in the past five years, the population has ballooned by 41%, hitting 1.04 million in July.
This has meant landscaping not only for new hotels and resorts and downtown beautification projects, but also for golf courses and tens of thousands of new homes.
What makes the market open to Southern California growers is the Las Vegas climate. The region has no wholesale nursery industry of its own because the extremes of broiling summers and freezing winters are too harsh for year-round growing operations.
So when home and office construction all but stopped in Southern California at the beginning of the decade, nursery owners fixed on Las Vegas.
At Village Nurseries, a wholesale grower that specializes in bedding plants and shrubs, salespeople rarely traveled outside a 100-mile circle around Orange County, sales manager David House says.
Now, however, the Las Vegas and Phoenix markets account for about 11% of Village’s annual sales--with most of the desert market concentrated around Las Vegas.
Like Bergen, Anaheim-based Village has set aside a growing area just to provide the kinds of plants that do well in the Nevada desert.
Although the selection is limited, they are mostly the same kinds of plants that can be seen in any Orange County front yard.
“It is a different market,” said Bud Summers, general manager of Hines Nurseries Inc., an Irvine grower that provides plants to retailers in most of the western United States. Residents there buy perennial flowering plants to use as annuals because the plants die off in the winter and summer.
That is a bonus for growers, who get repeat orders for perennials.
Summers says the Las Vegas market alone accounts for 3% of Hines’ $30 million in annual sales.
“It is a unique place,” he said. “We can concentrate one marketing representative on that one town and do very good. Our other marketing reps need territories four or five times as big to do as well.”
Growers aren’t the only ones profiting. Southern California landscape architects and contractors have found a jackpot in Las Vegas too.
In the 13 years that Lifescapes International Inc. has been working there, the Newport Beach-based landscape architect has seen its clientele grow from individual homeowners to huge commercial and public works projects such as the Mirage Hotel Casino, the Treasure Island Hotel, the 1,000-acre Sun City Summerlin retirement community and the 4.5-mile Las Vegas Strip Beautification program.
“Las Vegas now accounts for 30% of our total business,” Lifescapes principal Julie Brinkerhoff-Jacobs said.
Tom Carpenter is operations manager for the landscape contractor executing Lifescapes’ plans for the downtown rejuvenation.
It is a $13-million job, and jobs like that are the reason his Calabasas-based company, Valley Crest Landscape Inc., decided several years ago to open a Las Vegas office.
“We were the [landscape] contractor on the original McCarran Airport remodeling eight years ago,” he said, “and that opened our eyes to the opportunities here. Southern California supplies the entire West” with landscape materials and services, Carpenter said.
Las Vegas is a particularly good market “because most people who live here aren’t natives, they are from somewhere else, and a lot of them come from Southern California. They bring their tastes in landscaping with them.”
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Nursery Sales
After declining for several years, wholesale nursery sales climbed in 1994 in both Orange and Los Angeles counties. In millions of dollars:
LOS ANGELES: $151.7
ORANGE: $128.0
Sources: Orange and Los Angeles counties’ agricultural commissions.
