For nurseries and garden centers, the recession is just another pest

LORI YOUNG/FLORIDA WEEKLY At Driftwood Garden Center in Naples, shoppers can find a myriad of plants plus containers, decorative accessories and all the tools they need to cultivate a great lawn or garden. There's also a thriving Driftwood location in Estero. In the nursery business, the spring of hope never becomes the winter of despair, because something is always growing.

But even in this industry, and even at a disciplined place like John Sibley's All- Native Garden Center in Fort Myers, a lush and tidy urban nursery where pests and plant killers and the reactive science of biotechnic fertilizers probably have the most minimal effect, there is one pest that no species and no spring season can avoid: recession.

Native species prove more immune than exotics to a range of maladies. But not to that one.

"We're not immune to the economic downturn, or whatever you want to call it," Mr. Sibley explains simply, describing what he views as merely another tick in the business of which he is a veteran.

"Sales are slower than usual, but we still keep a full stock of the full inventory," says Rufino Hernandez, whose parents arrived in Naples from Cuba and opened Golden Gate Nursery in the early 1980s. Rufino's brother, Jorge, now operates the 10-acre nursery off Collier Boulevard.

At Golden Gate Nursery, Rosa Hernandez with her grandaughter, Sabrina Nicole Hernandez, and sons Jorge, left, and Rufino Hernandez. Fortunately, there's a flip side of the coin — the bright side for nurseries from Naples to Fort Myers, say the horticultural experts who manage them: the big green awareness machine.

Mr. Sibley puts it this way: "With the heightened concern about global warming and environmental issues, people are starting to really get into the notion of 'Think globally, act locally.'" That means they continue to buy from and to rely on local nurseries, even though they might not buy the same things, in the same quantities, and they don't buy for the same reasons.

That's more true of retail than it is of the wholesale businesses, but it's a factor in both, say owners and managers.

"We're selling a lot of natives, a lot of butterfly gardens, and the green merchandise in fertilizing and pest control… green products are very big," says Craig Hazlett, president of the family-owned Driftwood Garden Centers in Naples and Estero, where just about everything for the home garden is available, from plants and soil to decorative fountains. Also popular, Mr. Hazlett says, are herbs and food plants, such as tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants and the like.

"We have a lot of the new things, especially because of the new fertilizing restrictions in Naples and Fort Myers," says Mr. Hazlett, whose parents came to Naples from Indiana about the same time the Hernandez family arrived from Cuba. The Hazletts purchased an existing business, renamed it and brought the whole family in on the operation.

"We sell more of a specialty fertilizer now," Mr. Hazlett adds, explaining, "You can't have nitrogen and phosphates. Usually fertilizer is described by a three-number sequence, and now the first two numbers need to be zero and zero."

A year old in Naples and a mere 10 days old in Fort Myers, the ordinances define the new guidelines with no equivocation: Fertilizers must now contain zero nitrogen and zero phosphorous. Potassium content in a fertilizer is usually summed up in the third number.

At Sibley's All-Native Garden Center, the law is one of two events "that have helped increase both our direct retail sales and our wholesale sales," Mr. Sibley says. The other is President Obama's push for going green. "People are more aware of water quality issues and other environmental issues now," he says.

The result: more educated buyers, and enough sales at area nurseries to keep them robust, even if the economy and some other businesses aren't.

"The market has changed," suggests Mr. Sibley. He added six customers in his center last week had just purchased foreclosed properties in Cape Coral, and "The first thing they did was look up 'native nursery.' That didn't used to happen."

Mr. Sibley and his fellow garden-center and nursery owners are entering their busiest season. Now that the summer rains have started, year 'round residents who waited throughout the dry months are buying and planting.

A growing business

While his brother runs Golden Gate Nursery, Rufino Hernandez owns and operates the upscale Garden District Flower Shop, a Neapolitan business with locations on Third Street South and on U.S. 41. A third is planned on 10th Street North.

After growing up in the family business, Mr. Hernandez went to Johnson and Wales University in Rhode Island and earned a degree in event production. He already understood horticulture and nursery marketing. When his father Ruben became ill early in this decade, he returned from the north to his family, first helping Jorge run the nursery, and then five years ago opening the Garden District, which provides floral arrangements and services for private parties and gala fundraisers throughout the area.

But that doesn't mean he considers his own business separate from the nursery.

"We try to create cross-lateral selling opportunities," Mr. Hernandez said about his business and Golden Gate Nursery. "So if someone comes into my shop and needs something else, I can send them out to the nursery. And if someone comes into the nursery with a need for what we have, (Jorge) can send them here."

There is so much business in the nursery, apparently, Jorge Hernandez has his hands full — too full to chat. He answered the phone twice on two consecutive days last week and said he was too busy for a

Florida Weekly reporter — which bodes well for nurseries, especially industrialsized operations like his.

Thomas Edison's legacy

At the Edison-Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers, meanwhile, horticulturist Debbie Hughes describes what's happening to the market, and to buyers, from her small but seemingly magical growing ground. There, science and beauty both sit at the board table, she says, and scores of species, from delicate herbs to trees that could someday tower overhead, are treated as royalty.

The Edison-Ford Winter Estates nursery specializes in plants that Thomas Edison grew 75 to 100 years ago (that alone gives the nursery a huge range), but it also grows other things that are either beautiful or useful, or both.

"People are smarter with their money now," Ms. Hughes says about the customers she helps at the nursery. "They actually ask questions and try to learn more about the plants."

Especially in hard times, she adds, it's human nature to want to see things grow, to nurture something lovely. "They still have to have things to make them happy. Here, they'll buy some flowers or herbs, or tropical fruits. People love that… a lot of them have a mindset of, 'I want to grow something.'"

Often, growing something, or managing what grows with a little help from a nursery, can save money.

"People are doing more on their own, especially in Collier County," says the Driftwood Garden Centers' Mr. Hazlett. "Before, so much was done by lawn services. But now some homeowners are taking on projects by themselves."