O.C. Plant Nurseries Get Boost as Las Vegas Booms : Agriculture: With Southern California development in doldrums, Nevada growth takes up landscaping slack.
Many of the big diesel-belching 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 Orange County’s nursery business, which has been hurt badly by the collapse of the Southland’s development industry.
At its peak in 1991, nursery stock was a $142-million business in the county. That fell to $117 million in 1993, but has rebounded to $128 million this year, according to the county agricultural commission. Most of the growth in the past two years has come from sales of landscape plants.
“We’ve bought eight brand new 45-foot trailers in the past year just because of our increased shipments” to Las Vegas resort, casino and shopping mall developers, said Russ Kelly, general manager of Bergen Nurseries in Brea.
The company ships all kinds of trees, but particularly likes jobs that call for palms. Many of the types that do well in Las Vegas are very slow growing--some sprouting barely an inch of new height a year--and they 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 multitrunk 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 doesn’t fetch quite that premium, but they are up to 10 times more costly than typical broad-leafed trees 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,” said Kelly. “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 hotel and resort construction and downtown beautification projects, but also for golf courses and the 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, nurseries fixed on Las Vegas.
At Village Nurseries, a wholesale grower that specializes in bedding plants and shrubs, salespeople rarely traveled outside of a 100-mile circle around Orange County, says sales manager David House.
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, he said.
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 they die off in the winter and summer.
That is a bonus for growers, because they get repeat orders for perennials.
Summers says that 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 the Newport Beach-based company has been working there, landscape architect Lifescapes International Inc. has seen its clientele grow from individual homeowners to huge commercial and public works projects such as the Mirage Hotel-Casino, Treasure Island hotel, the 1,000-acre Sun City Summerlin retirement community and the 4 1/2-mile Las Vegas Strip Beautification program.
“Las Vegas now accounts for 30% of our total business,” said Lifescapes principal Julie Brinkerhoff-Jacobs.
Tom Carpenter is operations manager for the landscape contractor executing Lifescapes’ plans for the strip 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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Top Crop
Despite Orange County’s citrus namesake, wholesale nursery plants are its top agricultural product, valued at $128 million in 1994, up 9.4% from 1993. Total Orange County wholesale nursery sales, in millions:
1989: $133
1994: $128
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In Demand
Favorites in the Las Vegas market:
* Oleanders
* Sod (heat-tolerant varieties)
* Mesquite
* Blue palo verde (desert tree)
* Mediterranean fan palm
* Mexican fan palm
* Canary Island date palm
* Modesto, Arizona and Fan-tex ash
* African sumac
* Honey locust
* Robinia purple robe
* Mondell pine
* Alderica pine
* Aleppo pine
* Italian stone pine
* Fruitless olive
* Privet hedge
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Best Seller
Landscaping plants accounted for 80% of the county’s wholesale nursery crop value in 1994. What the nursery industry grows and the value of each type of crop:
*--*
Crop Production Value Landscaping plants 28,935,560 $101,555,100 Bedding plants and ground covers 1,363,982 flats $8,342,200 Cut flowers 385,095 dozen $1,318,600 Christmas trees 17,480 $651,200 Potted plants 5,542,078 $15,442,700 Miscellaneous* 678,600 Total nursery stock 127,988,400
*--*
* Includes sod, stolons, field-grown vegetable plants, aquatic plants and miscellaneous seeds.
Source: Orange County Agricultural Commission
Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times
