Comments on Gooding's Nursery, by Lynette Kinser

The company I found most interesting on the horticulture field trip is Gooding's Nursery and Landscaping located in Sherrodsville, Ohio. Founded in 1950 by R.J. Gooding, the company started out as a 3 acre family nursery called Gooding's Evergreen Nursery and has grown over the years to a corporation which carries out a large variety of work. Gooding's originally mostly grew evergreens under the hand of R.J., but as the business expanded and after R.J. passed away in 1990, Gooding's phased out of most of their growing. Now, under R.J.'s son, Dick Gooding, a graduate of OSU, this comprehensive business focuses on wholesale nursery production, landscape design and construction, maintenance and arborist services, and a retail garden center.

Gooding's works hard to provide quality plants at reasonable prices and to treat customers with fairness and honesty to make sure they are happy with their products and services. This company has expanded to a total of 89 acres with multiple departments but has still been able to give customers the individual attention and care they need and want. According to Dick Gooding, "we intend to improve the environment and satisfy customers' needs while striving to be a growing and profitable income source for our employees. In a sound environmental fashion, we will continue to provide quality goods and services." Gooding's works to grow, install, and maintain a variety of plants from ornamental grasses to pompom junipers, and to design and maintain landscapes for commercial areas and private homeowners. Despite all the many products and services already supplied, Gooding's feels the need to be constantly growing in developing new or better products and services to be an industry leader in the nursery/landscape field.

Gooding's employs fifteen workers full-time and employs twenty-three seasonal. Eight of these employees belong to the landscape crew which covers installations, maintenance, health care, and lawn care. The landscape, retail, and growing departments each have a head person who oversees the work being done. 80% of the landscape jobs done by Gooding's are residential design and construction while the other 20% is commercial. Their service area covers a 50-mile radius to Sherrodsville, mostly in Tuscarawas, Carrolton, and Harrison Counties for about 300 clients yearly.

A beautiful Nyssa sylvatica at a Gooding's
landscaped site
About 75% of their profit comes from the landscaping services, 15% from retail, and about 8% from the growing department. Along with the offices, other buildings, garden center, and greenhouses, Gooding's keeps many compost piles on their 89 acres for use in landscaping services. Gooding's mostly grows trees which are either sold at the retail center or used by the landscape crew. The retail center carries bulbs, seeds, gardening tools and accessories, and many evergreens which have been manipulated into pompom shapes or have been grafted. Most of the landscapes that Mr. Gooding showed us had mainly trees and some shrubs. They seem to specialize more in trees than in perennials or annuals.

Our guides at the nursery
I had never really thought of trees as being one of the most beautiful aspects of a landscape until seeing the work that this company has done and hearing Mr. Gooding speak of the trees with such appreciation. The trees they grow are not started from seed but are bought at a young age. They keep them in rows in the soil, taking care of them until they are ready to use or sell them. Most of the work done on the landscaping side of the business is design, installation, construction and maintenance. Their designs are all done on computer for quicker and more accurate and precise plans. According to Mr. Gooding, this kind of technology is necessary to be a competitive leader in this industry in the future. I was very impressed with this company's ideals of providing quality service to each individual customer. I also was taken by their value of family life and with Mr. Gooding's strong faith in God as the means of his success as a businessman. The practice of designing landscapes on computer was new to me, so this also sparked my interest as something I want to learn to do. The broadness of jobs this company is able to accomplish on a daily basis due to their departmentalization also impressed me, as I have heard that it is much easier to specialize in just a couple things. Mr. Gooding had so much to offer us students in the way of advice on how to be successful in this field. I learned a lot from visiting this company and from hearing what he had to say.