Decking the landscape

Want a nice, big palm tree in the front yard?

Brian Adams has a fine-looking humilis with five trunks for about $13,000.

You rent the flatbed.

And the crane.

"With a lot of these custom homes, they don't hesitate to spend that kind of money. It's unbelievable what some people will spend on their landscaping," Adams, manager of Plant World Nursery on Charleston Boulevard, said.

It's almost as unbelievable as the number of people who want to buy something. As the Las Vegas Valley's population flourishes new landscaping businesses are sprouting up like, well, weeds.

"You see new ones every day," Jim Altwegg of Tri-T Landscaping of Nevada said.

Altwegg went into the landscaping business eight years ago. One key to success is branching out into a specialty, he says. Altwegg's company handles only big contracts such as projects for city governments or corporations, and he says that list of jobs continues to bloom.

"There are more projects and more infrastructure like roadways, city parks and schools. And there are all those master-planned communities and golf courses going up everywhere," Altwegg said. "It's really going crazy right now."

Clark County records show 31 nursery and nursery supply companies have business licenses now compared to eight in 1995.

But more isn't necessarily better, horticulturist Pamela Quigley, owner of Amargosa Garden Center, said.

"Now anybody with a lawn mower has a lawn maintenance business, and anybody with a pickup and a shovel is a landscaper," Quigley said. "Some people really mean well, but there are a lot of unscrupulous people out there who are just interested in getting paid."

Once residents have found a knowledgeable landscaper, the next hurdle could be finding the trees they want. With large subdivisions popping up like mushrooms, some residents find themselves waiting two years or more for the tree they want, Quigley, who has been in horticulture locally for 25 years, said.

Those who can't wait can't be too picky.

"With a lot of these huge trees, you had to know 15 or 20 years ago that there was going to be a market for them," she said. "Most of them are gone. If somebody wants a big tree in his yard, he'll have to get what's available.

"There aren't that many nurseries that carry the big stuff, and it gets used up faster than they can grow it," Quigley said.

She keeps a "wish list" for customers who want a specific tree or plant. When she finds it, she calls them.

"I've had people on a waiting list for two years for plants they wanted," she said.

Five or six years ago Quigley could have filled an order for a 15- to 20-foot oak tree on the spot.

"But not anymore," she said. "These big projects that need big plants right now are taking them all."

Developers pre-book and pay for trees that haven't even started growing yet, said Quigley, who deals with residents buying a single home and competes with developers buying plants for an entire subdivision.

"What's hard is you have a homeowner who comes in and doesn't understand that a developer can go in and do a contract and say, 'Grow these for me.' " Quigley said. "That's how much plant material is wanted and used here in the valley. It's just phenomenal."

Quigley helped write the horticulture booklets distributed by the Water Conservation District Desert Demonstration Gardens and teaches classes about plants and gardening in the public schools.

She said Las Vegas residents' fondness for trees is rooted in the post-Hoover Dam era of the 1940s. Elm, locust, fruitless mulberry and other trees from the East were popular then. Some still can be found in the city's older neighborhoods.

There weren't any established nurseries, so people had to plant whatever saplings they could bring with them, Quigley said.

Tastes change over the years. Some trees, such as the fruitless mulberry, have been banned by the county because of the misery they inflict on people with allergies.

Now many people opt for the oasis look with palms or choose desert plants.

But most still want lots of green and some shade. The philosophy behind that hasn't changed much, Quigley said.

"Most people want to get into their yards and forget where they're at," she said. "They're in total denial that they're in the desert."

Still any place people settle is bound to have trees because most people are drawn to them, said Karen Dyka, an educator with the Nevada Extension Services horticulture office and a self-described "tree person."

"I wouldn't want to see Las Vegas without trees," she said. "But I think the question is what we choose."

Most often it seems people choose the wrong size, Dyka said.

"We're planting a lot of quite large trees in very small areas," she said. "I don't think we're giving a lot of thought to the future."

Quigley said a tree's root system is three times the size of the canopy that grows overhead. Such roots can eventually do some hefty damage to a driveway or home foundation.

"But they say, 'I'm only going to live there a few years. It's going to be somebody else's problem.' I hear that every day," Quigley said.

Most people aren't going to run out and spend $10,000 or more on a single tree. Those shopping for something to stick in the back yard are looking at spending anywhere from $15 to $300 a foot, depending on the kind of tree, nursery workers said.

The longer it takes a tree to grow, the more it costs. A Mexican fan palm, which are the popular, skinny-trunked palms that line the parking lots and streets of many new subdivisions, cost about $16 a foot because they grow quickly.

But a sego palm, which takes decades to reach maturity, sells for about $30 an inch, Quigley said.

Once a tree gets into the 15-foot range, it might also mean paying for a special truck to deliver it, crane rental and the labor to plant it.

So a homeowner who buys a 20-foot canary palm at $250 a foot also will pay about $300 for the crane and $700 to $800 for the labor to deliver and plant it, Quigley said.

Still there are plenty of buyers willing to spend that kind of money.

The Resort at Summerlin spent $13.5 million on landscaping, said Julie Brinkerhoff, president of Lifescapes International, the California firm that designed the resort's grounds.

Cruise slowly along the main drive and look up. Those towering, tufted, Mexican fan palms cost $2,000 a piece.

And every last one of them came from California. With few exceptions, trees planted in Las Vegas come from farms in Arizona or Southern California because Southern Nevada's climate isn't good for cultivating.

Dry isn't the problem. Landscapers say it actually gets too cold in the winter -- especially for the palms.

Remember that the next time the thermometer reads 110.

"They love the heat," Adams of Plant World said. "It's the cold that bothers them."

Quigley said she spends as much of her day trying to talk people out of buying trees as she does selling them. The hardest part in dealing with newcomers is trying to get them past the instant-garden mentality.

But those who insist on loading up on lush shrubs and planting half a dozen trees right now are feeding what Quigley figures will be the next wave in the Las Vegas landscaping business.

"The next big boom will be redoing it for them and pulling it all out," she said.

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