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VY: Okay, so tell me about the things that your family grew at the nursery.

NH: Primarily it was azalea and camellia, and then they branched out to other container type plants, and there's a plant called cyclamen, which I noticed some pictures of when my grandfather used to grow them, so a lot of it was what my grandfather used to grow. I remember they tried cut flowers but they quit that, and I don't know if you're familiar with bedding plants, which are small plants, they tried that and they stopped that.

VY: Do you know why they stopped the cut flowers and the bedding plants?

NH: Probably (too) labor intensive for a short time, and there seemed to be other, also other growers grew that (type). And actually, for a while, for we were one of the few container type growers. So to their credit, they were able to make changes mid-stream, you might say, and survive.

VY: So it was container growing, is that primarily what you did?

NH: Yeah, and it continued all the way to when I came into the nursery.

VY: I see. So give me some examples of a container plant.

NH: (Finished products). Hanging basket with fuchsia, for example, with the flowers in it, and that plant itself, you can sell it up to the twelve-inch specimen or like a five-foot fuchsia tree, or a tree (with cascading) flowers, smaller baskets, and actually, we sold containers, starter fuchsia (plants). We were considered, across the United States, kind of a midsize nursery, so we were kind of caught in between growing small production and big production. And the way we survived, we diversified a lot of things. And at one time I counted our crops (grown) through the whole year, we had a hundred twenty-five varieties, it's way, way too much. But that's different sizes, different price ranges.

VY: That seems like a lot of different things to keep track of, and to know how to grow properly, sell, and who wants to buy them, and coordinate all that.

NH: So, in a way, we were able to service a few retail nurseries, not have a big customer base and have to go all over just (to sell) one type of plant. (For example), when we delivered, we could have ten varieties for them, which I thought was pretty... and most of our nurseries, our customers were all in East Bay, we didn't have to go into San Francisco (too much).

VY: And was that earlier or was that later, the larger customers?

NH: Throughout the whole nursery, the business, I mean, the history of the business.

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