Nursery owner rolls with economic tide

Mayer Berg with his native plants. COURTESY PHOTO Mayer Berg is a passionate enthusiast whose legs, like his big friendly voice, try to outrun him when he’s excited, which is most of the time.

“Greetings, my friend,” he calls heartily, hailing a visitor from amidst a forest of fresh bamboo, 20 kinds of it, bordering a pond. The sky-bound shoots frame the pond’s lush views in a series of thoughtfully composed still lifes.

Mr. Berg strides out of the bamboo, past his Florida Native Species Garden, cuts around the Butterfly Garden and races through the resplendent double ring of trees and flowering shrubs that encircle his classroom and front office at Riverland Nursery —so-named because the Caloosahatchee River lies only about 300 yards to the north.

When he arrives his hand shoots out to seize his guest’s, and they shake like old friends — and many new guests soon become old friends here at Riverland, they say. “Isn’t it a be-eautiful day?” he inquires, glancing five ways at once. In no direction is there anything that isn’t beautiful, it appears.

With his wife, the mosaic artist and business manager Sharon Berg whose work ranges from the whimsical to the profound and appears throughout the grounds, he opened the 3-acre nursery on Lee County’s State Road 80 east of I-75 just in time for the recession, in April 2007.

“We never knew the good times,” he admits. “There was a (economic) tsunami coming toward us, we just didn’t know it.”

But not to worry. People arrive from as far north as Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte and as far south as the Naples/Marco Island corridor every day now — all places where he’s doing business — to see this nuanced nursery for themselves.

The nuance can be summed up in one word: sustainable. The nursery’s hundreds of plant species all can be classified as What-You-Can-Grow-And-Easily-Sustainin the-Subtropics.

But easy to sustain for others is no easy task for the Bergs and their staff of six, who work seven days a week.

“We used to visit this nursery and it was not very attractive, and we always said it could be so beautiful — and now it is,” Mrs. Berg proclaims. “No one can imagine how hard Mayer has worked.”

Or Sharon Berg, either, who does the landscape design, which accompanies her mosaic art. “I look at landscape as being simply a big mosaic,” she says. “I can see what it’s going to look like, and I could see that for the whole nursery, how it was going to flow together.”

Riverland will design landscapes, install them, teach the owners how to care for them at minimal effort and cost, and offer free classes for any who wish to control their own plant destinies, Mr. Berg says. Their plants require little or no irrigation or fertilizer, they resist pests without poison, and they’re beautiful to see, smell and sometimes taste or eat.

Savvy-seeming as all that may be — and it seems exceedingly so when a homeowners’ association suddenly finds itself responsible for thousands of exotic plants that require huge amounts of water, fertilizer and labor because they don’t grow naturally, here — a recession is a recession. For almost any new businesses, that means a big ugly freeze that stunts the flow of the American greenback.

So adaptation, or careful thought in advance, is the name of the survival game. The Bergs learned that from the get-go, in their early years as a couple and as business owners in their native Minnesota.

They’ve owned and operated four businesses in the past, successfully, Mr. Berg says — Mrs. Berg is 57 and he’s 58 — and when they retired to full-time living here eight years ago, “I found I just couldn’t sit around successfully,” he adds.

Which is how they got to Riverland Nursery, right smack in the middle of a very invasive economic downturn.

“In a recession one becomes creative very quickly. Or rather, one becomes very consistent with the initial objective,” Mr. Berg explains, exhibiting the kind of articulation, perhaps, that comes with the territory for a history major who’s tried a lot of things. (His 25-year-old son, Joe Berg, a key presence in the business, is also a history major, at FGCU.)

“Our model is more of a mission — to focus on sustainability,” Mr. Berg adds. “To provide customers — whether golf courses, homeowners, homeowners associations, business owners, anybody with a serious interest in plants — an understanding of the requirements of their plants so they will have successful outcomes.”

The Bergs see themselves as both teachers and gardeners, in other words — but not as growers. As a result, when somebody from Syd Kitson’s state-of-the-greenart Babock City (now in the planning stages of a community designed to include 19,000 homes and six million square feet of commercial space in Charlotte County) asked if he’d consider managing a growing site at Babcock, “I explained very frankly that we are not growers,” he confesses.

“I’m not interested in that. Growers are like farmers. They do things like grow corn, or a couple kinds of plants in huge quantities, and when the bottom drops out, so do they. So many growers around Homestead who thought the boom would never end are now gone, because that’s what they did.”

By just saying no, Mr. Berg remained consistent with his initial objective and vision.

Water or the lack of it lies at the heart of that vision.

“So much of this is common sense,” he says. “We know in Florida we’re going to be dealing with less water for the rest of our lives down here. I’m certain that we’ll be living with one-day-a-week watering starting in the near future — and that’s if we’re lucky. So plants that can do that are the absolute minimum threshold.”

That bad news, if it is bad news, creates a disconnect with Mr. Berg’s manner, which suggests the great good cheer of a man about to introduce three rings to a packed house at Barnum & Bailey’s — all happy purpose, a showman, a proud owner.

More to the point, Mr. Berg is happy, perhaps, because he knows what he’s doing. He’s promoting plants you don’t find traditionally thriving, say, along the lush wall beds or streetscapes of gated communities and golf courses created early in the decade on the Southwest coast.

Often, he notes, those plants just don’t work without recession-impossible spending.

The Bergs learned this first hand — not merely as theory — when they moved into a Toll Brothers community in Estero, beginning in 2001.

“I had the misfortune — or the opportunity, depending on how you look at it — to start our Landscape and Grounds Committee for our development,” he explains.

“So I had a chance to see how a developer really looked at plant material and landscaping — and I learned that it was purely on the basis of marketing, without regard to what kind of payback you might face, or is it sustainable.

“Toll Brothers in this case made a marketing decision from Pennsylvania, where their corporate headquarters is. They decided that every house should have hibiscus. Most people from the North associate paradise with hibiscus. But in reality, it’s one of the most maintenanceheadache plants you could ever grow here. It requires thousands of dollars of powerful pesticides every year. It’s stupid.”

But so many other long-blooming, rugged plants suitable to the subtropics are not maintenance headaches, he concludes. And many developers, as well as homeowners or business owners looking to make their investments both lovely and enduring, are recognizing that.

“From day one in this business, I became intrigued by the efficacy of not just native plants — there are many great non-native plants — but plants that would require low maintenance and low water,” he says.

Or plants that might do well, but would require thought — like the coconut palm, for example.

“A lot of people (inland) might want to plant a coconut tree, because coconut trees will grow here. But in some places it might get just cold enough that such plants require covering in case of a freeze. So if you live in one of those places and you plant a (freeze-intolerant) coconut tree, you have to remember that it’s going to get 50 feet high in your lifetime. And then how are you going to cover it?”

Better to think about it in advance, figures Mr. Berg — or wander into Riverland Nursery and look for some options. 