Nurseryman Is Turning Over a New Leaf

Fishing is all Roy Kitano has on his mind these days. For nearly 30 years, Kitano has sold a variety of fruit trees, home gardening supplies and soil conditioning products as owner of Kitano’s Garden Center. Now the only contact he wants to have with dirt is digging up worms to bait his hooks.

“Fishing is my favorite pastime and I figure I should retire to get in as much of it as I can,” said Kitano, 77, sitting back at his desk. “Besides, my wife wants to do some traveling.”

At the end of February he will close Kitano’s Garden Center, ending a career in the nursery business that has lasted more than 50 years.

Kitano’s father started the first of what would become three nurseries in 1946.

His father was a schoolteacher in his native Toyama, Japan, and learned how to grow plants and fruit trees during World War II. After spending 10 months in the Manzanar internment camp in Owens Valley, Kitano’s father took a job on a farm near Grand Junction, Colo., in 1942 to get his family released.

“If a man wanted to get his family out of the camps, the rule was if you got an offer to work somewhere then they would let you go,” Kitano said.

After the war, Kitano’s father brought the family back to Southern California where he began growing fruit trees and other plants on an acre he had purchased in Compton before the war.

Kitano and his brother eventually took over the operation of Kitano’s Garden Center, and added stores in Long Beach and La Palma.

La Palma has changed since Kitano opened his last store in 1971. The dairies and orange groves that once surrounded his Orangethorpe Avenue store are gone. Also missing are the small shops that catered to the needs of this community of 16,000, replaced now by larger commercial businesses.

But Kitano said he is not being forced into retirement by the larger stores. He is simply leaving because it’s time. “My wife and I just figured that the time has come when we should get out,” Kitano said.

Over the years Kitano has imparted his knowledge of plant growing to his employees. Some have decided to stay in the nursery business.

“A lot of the kids who have worked for me in the past are still working for nurseries,” Kitano said.

“‘I’m sure it’s because working here they learned a bunch,” he said. “I’m sure it comes easy to them . . . if they worked for me then they know plants.”

Andre Briscoe can be reached at (714) 966-5848.