Nabel's closed, other local nurseries struggle to stay afloat

• Orchid grower will take over the Nabel%27s site in White Plains
• Rosedale says business is good
• Down to Earth rebrands as Down to Earth Living

Across the country, family-run nurseries are struggling to stay afloat, and we're certainly seeing that here in the Lower Hudson Valley. Faced with competition from supermarkets and big box stores, changing demographics and rising overhead costs for property taxes, fuel, insurance and personnel, many of these old-fashioned garden centers simply no longer can make a go of it.

Already this year, Nabel's Nurseries in White Plains, one of the oldest and best-known garden centers in Westchester, has closed its doors and sold its 5-acre site on Mamaroneck Avenue, for $4.5 million, to an orchid grower called Star Orchids.

"I had to sell because I couldn't make the business pay the bills," says Paul Nabel. "I'm still cleaning it out, getting rid of 70 years' worth of stuff."

Nabel says that an earlier deal to sell to an assisted living facility fell through and that he's glad the property will remain a horticultural operation. "They want to take down 90 percent of what we have and put up brand new stuff."

Sprainbrook Nursery, which was opened on Underhill Avenue in Scarsdale by Al Krautter's parents in 1944, has also been struggling for the past couple of years, going from two dozen employees to just Krautter and his wife and a handful of full- and part-timers.

"Things are so-so," says Krautter, who is 79 and has refashioned his operation in recent years to an all-organic one. "We're hanging in there. With limited staff, we grew a very good selection of organic vegetables and annuals and perennials. The place looks quite pretty."

Some local nurseries, including Rosedale in Hawthorne, which is Westchester's largest garden center, say they're doing well this year. Rosedale was founded in 1898 and has been in the hands of the T

aylor family since 1929.

"Our Landscape Department continues to be busy with small- to large-scale residential projects in Westchester and Fairfield counties, and running through the Hudson Valley on both sides, from New York City to Dutchess and Litchfield counties," says Dan Taylor, who runs the nursery with his father, C. Powers Taylor. "We have a nice mix of suburban, urban and country estate projects."

Part of the reason Rosedale has been so successful is that they grow their own shrubs, trees, perennials and annuals on 500 acres of farms in Westchester, Orange and Ulster counties. Unlike plant material shipped from the West Coast, their plants are locally grown and primed to do well in Hudson Valley yards and gardens.

Rosedale has also seen an uptick in sales to the trade, Taylor says, "due to both our availability of a wide range of species and sizes and much higher trucking costs for deliveries from longer distance growers."

Across the Hudson River, Stuart Leventhal, the longtime owner of Down to Earth in Pomona, also says that his business is mostly good. "The season got off to a very challenging start, but I guess I'll say that God is smiling on us. It's always slow this time of year, but for the whole season, I can't complain."

This year, in a rebranding effort, Leventhal added "Living" to the name of his operation, expanding his successful line of outdoor furniture to include vases, ginger jars, high-end pots, tabletop items, mirrors and wall art.

"We're putting our toe in the water, to see if there's a market out there," he says. "The response has been decent."

Several garden centers have already gone under. In 2012, Matterhorn, long the Cadillac of Lower Hudson Valley nurseries, shut down its 34-acre operation in New Hempstead.

Bill Kolvek Perennials has shut down its retail store in Chestnut Ridge and gone back to selling mostly wholesale (and on Sundays at the Ramsey, N.J., farmers market).

In Scarsdale, Krautter says he wants to keep his nursery going as long as he can. "It's kind of sad what has happened to a great industry. It's a dying business."

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Follow Bill Cary's In the Garden blog at gardening.lohudblogs.com. Twitter: @BillCaryNY