Gardening Blossoms as Industry in California

New Jersey already has dibs on the Garden State. So let’s call California the Gardening State.

Here’s the reason: Californians spend nearly $10 billion each year to maintain their yards, trim golf courses, landscape freeways and generally keep the Golden State looking green, a new UC Berkeley study has found.

But we also spend more on gardening for the dead than for our schoolchildren. An acre of lawn and trees in a typical California cemetery costs $5,000 more to maintain than the same area of a schoolyard.

Blessed with a mild climate and plentiful land, California has always had a booming agricultural industry. But nowadays we hire gardeners, hit nurseries and sink green thumbs into backyard loam with such gusto that urban horticulture has grown to half the size of the farming economy. And with the spread of suburbia, it’s almost certainly gaining.

“People don’t think of horticulture as an industry, let alone a very large one,” said George Goldman, the UC Berkeley economist who led the study. “But there’s a lot of jobs and money involved.”

The days of Beaver Cleaver mowing the neighbor’s lawn for a quarter are long gone. Each year, professional gardeners and lawn-care firms mow, blow and go to the bank with an estimated $1.1 billion.

Another $1.8 billion fuels do-it-yourself yardwork, everything from flats of gazanias to coiled garden hoses. With eight of 10 households maintaining a planted yard, Californians spend $382 million just watering lawns and landscaping. Indoor plants fetch $1.6 billion, while cut flowers ring up sales of $1.4 billion. Overall, the horticultural industry supports 125,000 jobs, the study says.

Goldman said a prime motivator for the growth of the state’s “green industry” is the increase in dual-income families. With incomes growing and spare time shrinking, households increasingly turn to professionals for routine maintenance like lawn care and tree trimming.

“It’s like the food industry,” said Goldman, who conceded that his wife maintains their own backyard in Berkeley. “We’re seeing an upturn in convenience foods and takeout because people don’t have time to cook.”

Rhett Beavers, a Hollywood landscape architect who teaches at UCLA, has seen growth in the ranks of professional landscapers and a proliferation of magazines focused on home and yard. The result has been increasingly sophisticated--and expensive--landscapes.

One factor could wilt the horticultural industry--a shortage of water. But gardening in the Golden State will probably continue to bloom. The trend toward water-saving xeriscaping persists, even with drought a fading memory. And sales of drip irrigation and drought-tolerant plants are rising.

Not surprisingly, botanical gardens are the most expensive landscapes to maintain, costing nearly $12,000 an acre. Next on the list are cemeteries at $7,900 an acre; residential yards and golf courses both cost $5,000 per acre. Roadside plantings run up $4,500 an acre.

Near rock bottom are parks, at $3,100 an acre, and schools, where taxpayers spend $2,800 an acre to trim play yards and mow ball fields.

The only landscapes cheaper to maintain are the glum corridors under high-power electrical lines.

“It’s unfortunate,” said Doug Stone, a state education department spokesman. “A school doesn’t have to have a manicured lawn like some house from Beverly Hills, but how it looks is a reflection on a community.”

There is some hope. At the Los Angeles Unified School District, plans are afoot to green up playgrounds now dominated by asphalt. Funds from a $2.4-billion school bond measure approved in 1997 as well as private-sector aid will provide the financing.

Beavers applauded the move. “I think people are starting to realize we’ve neglected our kids too long,” he said. “Greenery can help give a certain sense of pride and make a school more humane.”