For over 40 years, from about 1975 until 2023, the land behind the farmhouse was Hanson Nursery, a landscape tree nursery that John and Arline Hanson built from scratch and ran themselves.
How it started
The idea came from a neighbor. Mr. Mims, a local nurseryman, rented some land at the back of the farm and planted several hundred trees there. As John was nearing retirement from Florida Power & Light, Mr. Mims showed him how a field-grown tree nursery worked.
John and Arline were intrigued. Other local nurserymen helped them get started too, welcoming John as a fellow nurseryman. The first trees went in around August 1975.
John and Arline did nearly all the work themselves. A young man who had worked for Mr. Mims helped part-time on weekends for many years, sometimes even at night when a rush order had to be dug. Starting in 2001, Bill and Ellen also came for a long weekend each month to work on the farm, and sometimes for a week or more after hurricanes.
The Hansons learned that the key thing about a retirement business is to focus. Do a few things very well, specialize, and earn a good reputation. The Hanson Nursery was never an all-purpose nursery. They planted only a few species of trees, field-grown only, and wholesale only.
Laying out the fields
To set up the nursery, first a large grader was used to level the land. Then John carefully surveyed a grid running north-south, with trees spaced 8 by 12 feet. This spacing gave each field-grown tree full sun and room to spread.
Underneath 18 inches to 2 feet of muck lay a layer of limestone marl, ancient coral reef, where tree roots couldn't grow. So John bored a 3-foot-diameter hole through the marl at each spot on the grid with an auger, and filled every hole with good topsoil.
From sapling to shade tree
John and Arline bought saplings (a couple of hundred at a time) from big wholesale nurseries in the Redland, near Homestead, brought them home in a trailer and planted them in the fields. The trees then needed to grow for 4 to 6 years to reach 10 to 15 feet tall, the size builders and landscapers wanted.
The nursery held up to about 2,000 trees at a time. Every tree sold was replaced, so a sale of 50 trees meant getting 50 new saplings, starting the cycle again.
Harvesting a Tree
Once an order for a field-grown tree came in, the tree couldn't just be pulled up and handed over. Getting it ready to be taken to a new location for successful transplanting took 2 to 3 months.
1. Root pruning. First, two rings were cut around the tree about 8 inches apart, the soil between them dug out, and every root cut. The east and west sides were done first, the north and south sides several weeks later. For trees such as live oaks, whose roots run flat and sideways, this caught them all.
2. Waiting. Over several weeks, the cut roots would put out new feeder roots inside the ring.
3. Lifting. The tree trunk was first wrapped in burlap to protect it, then the tree was lifted out of the ground using the boom on John's 1972 Massey Ferguson tractor. The root ball was then wrapped in large burlap sheets pinned tight with special nails.
4. Misting. The tree was then moved to a misting area for about a month to keep the root ball moist and encourage new roots. This was done so that the tree would not go into shock when replanted.
5. Loading. When trees were ready for delivery, buyers sent a flatbed truck, sized to fit the order, to pick up the trees. John brought the trees over on the tractor, and the truck crew showed where each one should be laid, with the root ball to the front and the canopy toward the back. The load was then tied down and covered before starting on its way.
Replanting
A semi truck periodically dumped mounds of washed Redland topsoil at the north and south ends of the nursery. John then swapped the tractor's boom for a front-end loader to refill the empty tree holes.
Each new sapling was set exactly over its auger hole on the grid, with fertilizer pellets in the bottom. Then came "the nurseryman walk": stomping the soil firmly around the stem of the tree to remove air pockets and keep the trunk straight. A small berm was then formed around each tree. For about a month afterward, depending on the weather, Arline drove the golf cart down the rows with a garbage can full of water, and she watered each new tree every day with a gallon bucket.
What they grew
Live oaks were the heart of the nursery. They are beautiful, hardy and always in high demand, and they stand up well to hurricanes and block wind before it reaches a house. The Hansons' live oaks were planted all over South Florida. When John and Arline passed a place where some of their trees had been sent (a new shopping center, for example), they would sometimes say, "Those are our trees."
The Hansons also grew silver buttonwood and gumbo limbo. Mahogany was tried but did poorly, because it likes higher, drier ground. Carrotwood and black olive were popular early on, but were later dropped. Carrotwood was officially listed as invasive in 1995. Like any farm, the nursery changed its crops as it learned what worked best.
Customers
Hanson Nursery sold wholesale, mostly to landscapers and developers. It very rarely sold to homeowners, since it had no way to deliver trees off the property. Demand grew in the 1980s and 1990s, after local rules began requiring landscaping in new subdivisions. From the 1980s to about 2015, the nursery listed its trees and prices in Betrock's Plant Finder, the trade guide nurseries and landscapers used.
People in Davie still say John was a pleasure to do business with and grew great trees. He and Arline took great pride in their nursery and kept it well maintained. They also felt attached to every tree they grew. Once, organizers of a well-known celebrity's party in Miami Beach sought to purchase trees for the event. John and Arline refused to sell to them because the trees would be thrown away afterward.
Hard years
Like any farm, the nursery had good years and bad ones. Frost in the late 1970s and early 1980s killed hundreds of trees, which then had to be cut down and pulled out.
Hurricanes knocked many trees over. The nursery was hard hit by Andrew in 1992, the four hurricanes of 2004, Wilma in 2005 and Irma in 2017. After a storm, each downed tree had to be judged: stand it back up, or take it out.
Hurricanes caused trouble for the nursery operations in other ways as well. Over the years, a jungle area had grown up between the house and the nursery, with huge Australian pines, melaleucas and bischofia (bishopwood) trees, all invasives. Inevitably, some of the jungle trees would be downed by a hurricane, with some falling across the paths leading to the nursery trees. The problem was that the nursery equipment was stored and serviced on the side closer to the house. So the paths needed to be cleared quickly. Clearing away everything else could wait, so it could be months before all of the downed trees were cut up and the logs and debris moved to a cleared area in the jungle.
The last years
Working at the nursery kept John and Arline healthy and active well into their 90s. However, the business began to slow after Wilma in 2005 and the 2008 financial crisis. John died in 2016. Bill, by then retired and spending more than two weeks a month at the farm, kept the nursery going and kept selling trees until Arline passed away in 2022, at the age of 101.
Hanson Nursery ended operations in 2023. That was when the original developer contracted to buy the farm and was granted the rights to all the remaining trees. It then moved several hundred of them to a number of its other residential developments.