52-year-old Richland business specializes in trees, plants, landscaping, customer service

The owner of a longtime Richland nursery impressed his first customer when he was 8 years old by rattling off the scientific name of a Japanese umbrella pine: Sciadopitys verticillata umbrella folia. 

[blockquote quote="Our average employment is 12 to 15 years. You just don’t see that in small business." source="Paul Wood, owner of Wood’s Nursery and Garden Center" align="right" max_width="300px"]

“It’s really a pretty tree. But people wouldn’t let me wait on them when I was 8 or 9. We had one of these sitting by the door and I told them the name and it broke the ice,” said Paul Wood, owner of Wood’s Nursery and Garden Center at 2615 Van Giesen St.

The 52-year-old business recently finished its first-ever renovation that includes a new gazebo and shade awning in front of the garden store.

Work on the improvements started in November but “we ran into a bad winter and that slowed us down as the ground was frozen 16 inches down, making it difficult to start work on the pavers,” Wood said. “We’re investing in the future of it. It needed to be done.”

Wood and his brother Tom inherited the business from his late father Zane who died in 1982. Paul Wood eventually bought his brother out.

He now employs 17 full-time workers who help run the four-acre operation.

“We hire people who really truly love plants and want to know more about plants. We’ve kept our help for a long time. Our average employment is 12 to 15 years. You just don’t see that in small business,” he said.

It’s one of the reasons LaNinya Jansky of Richland shops there.

“The staff is so friendly,” she said as she flipped through a gardening book to look at flowering trees with Paul Wood’s son Zane Jr., 28. She settled on a dogwood tree as a housewarming present for a friend.

The nursery sells fruit, ornamental and shade trees, roses, shrubs, bushes, flowers, herbs, succulents, vegetables and bedding plants.

“I’d say it’s the nicest garden center in Central Washington,” Paul Wood said.

About 25 percent of the nursery’s inventory comes from plugs and cuttings that its workers grow. It has three indoor greenhouses and a cold frame house to transition plants from the greenhouse to outdoor temperatures.

“Longtime customers and avid gardeners seek us out, as they will other garden centers. Us, Mac’s (Garden Center in Pasco) and Job’s (Nursery in Pasco) are the only independently-owned true nurseries around,” Paul Wood said.

Wood’s Nursery opened its gift shop in 2015, offering a wide assortment of wall art and other decor. There’s also pottery from Asia that’s been fired for outside use.

The nursery sells hundreds of varieties of plants, some unusual.

Zane Wood Jr. said the nursery offers a variety of environmentally-friendly ways to reduce garden pests. It sells praying mantises, lady bugs, nematodes, lace wings, as well as bug houses to nurtur  an organic pest-fighting army.

Paul Wood said the nursery doesn’t spray its plants with growth retardant, as other garden centers attached to chain retailers do. “What we grow is specialty vegetables — growth retardant-free and pesticide-free,” he said.

Wood’s also is known for offering bigger trees with 2-inch caliper trunks that you wouldn’t find at the big box stores.

“They’re just not around anymore and you’re lucky to get them. We get them from people we’ve dealt with since 1965. That’s how we compete. Keep prices down and offer a different product,” he said.

Wood, 58, added landscaping services to the business when he was about 17 years old, as it was a hobby of his. He said the work accounts for about 25 percent of his business.

He won a “Best Commercial Yard of the Season” award in 2012 from the city of Kennewick for his landscaping at Allen Brecke Law Offices.

“I like working with people. That’s where the landscaping comes in. Next week I’m going to go do a house project. I drew the plan on a napkin,” he said.

Wood’s mother operated a nursery on Edison Street — formerly Willa’s Garden Center — for about eight years.

“She was the key to the nursery’s success in the early years,” Paul Wood said.

But the family decided to close it in 1996 so Paul Wood could coach his sons’ Little League teams.

Paul Wood said his father couldn’t make it to his games because he was always working so it was important to him to show up at his sons’ teams.

“I said I was going to work as an accountant and didn’t want to work at the nursery,” he recalled.

“I wanted to experience my kids growing up.”

He got a degree in accounting, which has served him well as a small business owner. 

His father, who negotiated General Electric labor contracts at the Hanford site, enjoyed gardening as a hobby for years.

“My dad loved gardening. He would win awards constantly at the fair for best hanging basket and for things like that,” Paul Wood said.

Paul Wood grew up in the sixties on Tinkle Street in Richland. The ranch homes there looked similar up and down the street, except for the Wood family’s home. Their yard was manicured unlike the others to include hills and boulders and a fish pond with koi. 

“It was kind of before his time,” Paul Wood said of his father’s landscaping.

He laughed as he told the story about what prompted his parents to start their nursery.

Every spring his dad would cook a big pan of soil in their kitchen oven to sterilize it before planting small seedlings.

Unbeknownst to the Wood household, a cat left its excrement in the soil one year.

“My mom came inside the house and it smelled awful. We had to open all the windows,” Paul Wood said. “My mom said he could no longer cook soil in the house.”

The nursery started not long after this mishap.

Paul Wood’s parents, Betty and Zane Wood, bought an acre and a half for the nursery on Van Giesen in 1965.

Ken Silliman of Farmers Exchange, gave the couple a leg up to launch their business.

“My dad bought $100 worth of stuff on credit. Ken brought him $1,000 worth and told him to pay when you get started,” Paul Wood said.

What’s the future of the nursery look like?

“Trying to hang on to what we got,” Paul Wood said.

His son Zane said he’s “cautiously optimistic from a business standpoint.”

“I look at my generation and I see a lot of people are uniquely disconnected from social interaction. I think people probably don’t get out and garden and go to stores as much as they used to. Hopefully we, the millennials, can figure that out,” Zane Wood said.

Wood’s Nursery is at 2615 Van Giesen St. in Richland. Call 509-943-1926, visit woodsnursery.biz or find them on Facebook.