In 1991, a couple decided to offer only the hardy giant grass at their nursery. Now, they sell everything they grow.
By ED QUIOCO
Published May 11, 2003
[Times photo: Carrie Pratt]
Jerry and Mary Ann Smith, owners of Bamboo Gardens in Palm Harbor, began selling bamboo at their nursery after a cold front devastated their tropical plants in the '80s.
PALM HARBOR - Jerry and Mary Ann Smith talk about the freeze that all but wiped out their nursery business like it was serendipity.
In a way, it was.
A devastating cold front in the mid-1980s turned their tropical plants into something that looked like wilted lettuce. Their inventory gone, they looked around their woody 3 acres to see if they had anything else they could sell.
The answer towered over the trees.
"There was nothing else left here that was alive except for bamboo," said Jerry Smith, 62.
They had never tried selling their bamboo, which was on the property when they bought the place, but with nothing else, they started. Gradually, they increased their crop and learned everything they could about the giant grass with the hollow woody stem. In 1991, they decided to sell nothing but bamboo.
They haven't regretted it.
In the years since bamboo has become a hit, and the Smiths sell everything they grow at Bamboo Gardens, 1200 Virginia Ave, just south of old downtown Palm Harbor.
"Our customer list is growing exponentially," with customers from as far away as Orlando and Florida's east coast, said Mary Ann Smith, 59.
At the same time, the plant that saved the Smiths' business gives the Bamboo Gardens a quiet, old-Florida beauty. Walk across the wooden bridge over Bee Branch Creek, which curves through the property, and it's easy to forget that suburbia surrounds the place.
Pushed by the breeze, tall bamboo stalks sway and creak softly, like faraway wind chimes.
"The tips, they dance, kind of," Mrs. Smith said. "They're very graceful."
Customers want the fast-growing plant to add an exotic accent to their back yards, to create a privacy screen or for shade. Bamboo floors also have become the rage in flooring.
"The demand is, at this point, much greater than the supply," said Robert Saporito, president of the Florida Caribbean chapter of the American Bamboo Society.
Bamboo Gardens, one of the only nurseries in the Tampa Bay area specializing in nothing but bamboo, sells more than 1,000 bamboo stalks a year and has a list of about 3,000 customers, Mrs. Smith said. Some varieties have a waiting list.
Small bamboo, like the Bambusa multiplex otherwise known as golden goddess, can grow 3 to 10 feet and cost $25. Large bamboo like the Bambusa ventricosa, or Buddha's belly, and the Bambusa oldhamii, or giant timber bamboo, can grow 40 to 60 feet. A root clump of Buddha's belly sells for $75, and a root clump of giant timber bamboo goes for $150.
The Smiths bought the 77-year-old nursery in 1978. Back then, the couple liked the property because it was big and the wood house built for the nursery's manager decades ago was "something we could fix up," Mrs. Smith said.
The plants were somewhat of an afterthought.
The couple figured they could run the nursery and use the profit to pay their mortgage. Neither had any experience, but how hard could it be?
"I have no idea what we were thinking," Smith says. "Had we been thinking, we wouldn't have gotten into it. It was youth and ignorance that drew us here."
Mrs. Smith ran the sales and bookkeeping end of things. Her husband did most of the digging during his days off from his job as a biology professor at St. Petersburg College. In between raising two children, the couple managed to keep the nursery going.
At first, they sold the kind of tropical plants found at hotels and restaurants. That proved to be difficult, because the plants needed a lot of water and were sensitive to the cold.
During winters, the couple used electric heaters to keep the plants warm. But that proved costly, and it took a few years for them to fine-tune the heaters' temperature settings. "We really screwed up big time, just dumb things, because we didn't know any better," Smith said.
Just as they started to get the hang of things, a freezing cold front came through the area about 20 years ago Widespread power outages meant they could not keep the plants warm at night.
"We walked out the next morning, and everything looked like lettuce that had been in the bottom of a box for days," Mrs. Smith said.
That's when they turned to the bamboo planted on the sides of the small creek that cut through the property. They aren't sure who planted the bamboo, but the plants have been there since the 1930s.
One theory is that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers planted the bamboo to stabilize the creek's banks.
The couple gradually planted more bamboo on the property and learned through trial and error and from library books how to transfer bamboo stalks and their root clumps to pots. Depending on the type of bamboo, that can take 25 minutes to 5 hours.
The plant grows fast and can reach full height within a few months. Bamboo thrives on high humidity, warm temperatures and moist, rich soil.
"We have measured growth on the new shoots that come up at about a foot a day," Mrs. Smith said.
There are two groups of bamboo: clumping and running.
The latter gave bamboo a bad reputation as a nuisance plant that can quickly overrun a yard. Running bamboo has an underground root system that may shoot a new stem 30 or more feet from the parent plant.
Clumping bamboo also reproduce from underground rhizomes or stems but these form in closely spaced groups. That means this type of bamboo is much easier to contain.
A skinny bamboo stalk can grow into a cluster several feet in diameter in a few years.
Amy Zeglin, 47, bought a bamboo stalk from the nursery about seven years ago. From that, she now has a bamboo cluster about 50 to 60 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter.
"It goes all above the oak trees in my yard, and it sways very beautifully in the wind, so it looks impressive," said Zeglin, of Palm Harbor.
She was drawn to bamboo because she lived for five years in Japan during the 1970s. Now, she has about four kinds of bamboo on her yard.
"I just love that look," Zeglin said. "It's lovely. It really is."
Saporito compares the effect that bamboo has to a light bulb.
"People who come to visit will say "Wow,' " he said. "It's almost shockingly noticeable."
And for Jerry and Mary Ann Smith, reassuringly profitable.
"Business just keeps growing and growing," Smith said. "And we are doing well."
