Garden Centers Enjoy Greening of Valley Homes
Nothing’s too good for our gardens these days.
We whip out credit cards for fancy pots, exotic flowering plants, eye-catching statues, fruit trees already heavy with bounty. We’re investing in upper-crust patio furniture, planting herb gardens that rival Thomas Jefferson’s, and re-landscaping our postage-stamp lots with a vengeance born of hours spent watching Home & Garden Television.
It’s a far cry from the recession-plagued early and mid-1990s, when strapped Valley residents hoarded their gardening pennies, and nurseries folded from lack of business. Today, the ones that held out are basking in the sunshine of prosperity.
“Our business is robust right now,” said Bud Bergquist, a member of the family that owns the Green Thumb/Green Arrow Nurseries. “We’re feeling the benefits of full employment and a good economy.”
From the mansion-studded hills of Calabasas to the flatlands of North Hollywood, Valley nurseries are listening to the sweet sound of ringing registers. Those in more affluent communities report a boom in the landscaping business, triggered by construction. But, the nurseries report, even households that can’t afford to bulldoze a house and rebuild are finding the money to add a touch of color here or a new tree there.
“It’s been fun, the last couple of years,” said Sterling Waldron, whose family owns Sheridan Gardens Nursery Inc. in Sun Valley and Burbank. “Yeah, it’s been all right.”
Fifty years ago, nurseries spread across the Valley like ivy down a hillside. The postwar building boom transformed farmland into block after block of ranch houses. The gardening centers followed closely behind.
Then came the 1970s and ‘80s, when land values exploded across Southern California. Many nursery owners responded by selling out and retiring on their profits.
Norman Mori watched the exodus from his front seat at Mel-O-Dee Garden Center in North Hollywood. Like numerous other Japanese American families they knew, the Moris opened a garden center a few years after World War II ended--in 1949. The businesses thrived for decades. But when it came time for the second generation to take over, many of the nursery owners’ children opted for other professions, leaving their parents facing retirement age and a tough decision, Mori said.
“Virtually all of them were in a location where the land became so much more valuable than the business itself that they ended up liquidating,” he said.
The Mori family proved an exception: Norman took over Mel-O-Dee from his father, and now his son, with a degree in landscape architecture, is training to run the business himself one day.
Those garden centers that did not cash in on the ‘80s real estate boom faced rough times as the Valley slipped into the recession of the early and mid-1990s. The lean economic times coincided with the arrival of mega-store Home Depot, which opened its first San Fernando Valley location in 1988. Thus, local gardeners were not only spending less. They had budget options when they shopped.
“In the ‘90s, the big-box stores came into town, and through their buying power and their limited selection, they could take a few products and lower the prices,” said Michael Kunce, president and chief executive of Armstrong Nurseries, a Glendora-based garden center chain. “A lot of people went in there to save money.”
Many nurseries could not survive the hit. Armstrong itself closed three of its 15 stores and asked its employee-owners to take voluntary pay cuts for 1992 and 1993, Kunce said. Altogether, he estimates, only 40% of the independent nurseries existing in the Valley in 1985 are still around today.
But those that do remain are glad they persevered. Since trimming down to a dozen nurseries in the early 1990s, Armstrong now boasts 39 stores from San Diego to Thousand Oaks, including ones in Studio City, Glendale and Valencia.
In Burbank and Sun Valley, the two Sheridan nurseries struggled to survive the bleak stretch that followed Lockheed’s closure of its massive Burbank aerospace plant.
But a couple of years ago, Sheridan’s customers started to show signs of recovery. They’re still not much into extensive planting jobs--not many new homes going up in the area, Waldron figures--but “herbs, boy has that grown,” he said. “And we’re doing a lot more of the statuary fountains and ironwork.”
Actually, nursery owners say much of their new business comes from this trend of homeowners turning their garden into an “outside room,” complete with its own artwork, furniture and special features, such as ponds and herb gardens.
At Sperling Nursery, an 11-acre spread in Calabasas, sales of pottery and gift shop items have grown to 20% of revenues, said owner Joe Sperling. Fruit trees are also hot, but not the saplings of yesteryear, he said.
“The trend is to buy larger sizes,” he said. “People don’t mind spending more money. That way they don’t have to wait as long for the fruit to be there.”
Independent nursery owners believe customers returned once their wallets got heavier and they could afford more than what was offered at the big-box stores. (Home Depot, which says its selection is competitive with local nurseries, typically allots one-third of an acre to its garden center; independents often sprawl across two or more acres).
Independents also claim to employ more knowledgeable staff than the big chain stores, making the small nurseries magnets for the serious gardeners looking for advice along with their ferns and geraniums. Atlanta-based Home Depot also disputes that, saying its above-minimum wages, benefits and opportunities for advancement attract many qualified candidates.
“We do have people who have specific training and knowledge to cover the customers’ needs in garden and lawn care,” spokeswoman Carol Schumacher said. “Some of [the employees], actually, come from independent nurseries.”
Home Depot claims to have lower everyday prices than its competitors, and few of the independents would dispute that. But, says Joe Sperling, owner of the Calabasas nursery, who cares?
“So what if you’re 10% higher than the lower price?” he said. “People want quality and service above everything else. I don’t gauge people, and I don’t know what price anybody [else] has got. I worry about one person--me.”
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WEB LINKS
www.garden.org: National Gardening Assn. Online National Gardening Magazine. Information on community gardens, youth garden grants, education and news. Includes Web links, news and links to shopping sites.
www.gardenweb.com/vl: Garden Links & Gardening. Comprehensive list of other garden-related sites including plant data banks, societies, botanical gardens, forums by subject and region.
https://garden-gate.prairienet.org: The Garden Gate. Collection of links to online articles and gardening news, shopping sites, virtual garden tours and more.
www.arborquest.com: ArborQuest.com. Online nursery specializing in woody plants. Includes instructions on planting, plant selection, and a well-organized search engine for other information.
https://ext.agn.uiuc.edu/wssa: Weed Society of America. Includes a glossary and pictures of poisonous plants and weeds, information on herbicides and time-lapsed movies of dying weeds after herbicide treatment, other databases and links.
www.can-online.org: California Assn. of Nurserymen. Industry organization. Site includes member list of nurseries, virtual tours and gardening news.
www.io.com/neighbor: The Gardening Launch Pad. Austin, Texas-based site boasts more than 3,000 links including water gardens, irises, orchids and plants native to the Southwest.
www.nhm.ac.uk/botany/linnaean/index.htm: Linnaean Project Homepage. Ongoing binomial plant classification begun in 1753 with the publication of Carl Linnaeus’ Species Plantarum.
https://supak.com/organic_gardening/organic.htm: Organic Gardening advice, books and articles.
Sites subject to change.
