This is especially exciting news for residents of the Coachella Valley, as Norman’s owns a 100-acre nursery in Mecca. Grace says it’s the jewel in the crown of the company’s eight locations, which range as far north as Linden in the San Joaquin Valley, as far west as the two yards in Carpinteria, and as far south as Mecca. There are also yards in San Gabriel, Piru, Fillmore, and Rush. Norman’s Nursery serves California and also has customers in Nevada, Arizona, and Texas.
Grace says his grandfather, Charles Norman, had the vision to create a yard in the desert in the mid-1990s. “It’s the neatest yard my grandfather ever set up,” he says. “Usually, he’d follow another nursery into a new climate and let the other guy make mistakes, but in the Coachella Valley, he was willing to be the first one through the door.” Grace says Charles Norman was prescient about the trend toward heat- and drought-resistant plants. “He saw the design tastes starting to change a little bit, where different kinds of succulents and cacti were coming into vogue. People were building in the Coachella Valley, and tastes started toward the desert palette. My grandfather got excited about that and wanted to grow the very best desert material.”
According to Grace, his great-grandfather, Francis Norman, and his wife migrated to California from North Dakota and settled in Pasadena nearly 100 years ago. Francis worked as a gardener on several estates in the area. Grace says global horticulture was very much in vogue at the time, and the estates featured a startling variety of non-native species. Francis and his young son, Charles, asked for cuttings; they would take them back to their East Pasadena home and grow them in the backyard. “They were good at the landscape piece [of their business], but they found that they were really good at growing,” Grace says.
Charles Norman went to serve in the Korean War, and when he returned, he took classes in horticulture at Cal Poly and fully committed himself to the nursery business. There was a housing boom in Southern California at the time, and people from all over the country moved into the ever-expanding suburbs. “It sparked a lot of creativity on the part of my grandfather and some other growers, and they embarked upon a 10- or 15-year experiment where they started bringing in plants from around the world to see what would take here,” Grace says.
While native species and those that are drought-tolerant are currently trending, the trend 50 or 60 years ago was “interesting, colorful, different plants,” according to Grace. He points out that many of those plants became synonymous with the local environment. Podocarpus, a ubiquitous hedge, comes from Africa, while the eucalyptus tree originated in Australia. “Ficus nitida, by the far the most popular hedge material in California, is not native here, but originally comes from South East Asia,” Grace says.
Charles Norman’s passion propelled the business forward – not with explosive growth, but with steady, incremental progress. Today, the nursery’s eight yards total over 1,000 acres and grow over 2,000 plant varieties in one-gallon to six-feet-square containers. Grace says while many of his colleagues and competitors sold off their valuable land to developers, Norman’s Nursery stayed the course. “Come hell or high water, Grandpa was never going to sell out,” Grace says. “He loved, loved, loved growing trees, and that’s why we’re still around. Our commitment and ambition is to keep doing this. We just love growing trees and helping make the Western U.S. a greener, more pleasant place to live.”
Grace lived near his grandparents when he was growing up, and in the summer, “we’d work for him a little bit, but it was more to push us around a little and tire us out,” he says. Grace traveled east to attend college, received an MBA, settled with his wife in Virginia, and worked in the financial industry for 10 years. “Over the years, as I was getting my business education together, my grandfather and I were having more and more phone calls,” he says. “I would ask if he’d thought about such and such for the business for the years ahead. We were having some rich conversations, but I had no desire to enter the business. I had my career in Virginia, and life was good. Then, a couple weeks shy of his 90th birthday, he called me up and asked, ‘Would you like to move back to California, learn some things about the nursery, and then run it in a couple years?’
“I looked at the mission of the business, about making the world a more beautiful place, about the wonderful things our business can do for the environment, and the charitable works of my grandparents that were so important to them … and at the beginning of 2021, my wife and I made the move to California.”
Though Charles Norman died in 2023 at the age of 92, Grace says the decision to join Norman’s Nursery was one of the best he made. “It’s just a wonderful organization with great, long-term employees,” he says.
Norman’s Nursery employs over 500 people – from yardmen (it takes one gardener to cover two acres per day in the yards) to administrators. Unlike many landscaping or gardening businesses that employ workers seasonally, Norman’s people are full-time employees, which creates loyalty throughout the ranks. Though the decision to officially open the gates to both wholesale and retail customers is recent, Norman’s Nursery gardening crews have decades of experience working with landscapers to perfectly implement their designs with minimal impact on clients’ yards. For instance, Grace says he was excited by a new excavator he recently acquired. “Instead of tearing a fence down, it’s small enough to drive through a garden gate,” he says. “It allows us to plant so much more safely and efficiently than just throwing 10 guys with shovels at a project.”
Grace’s excitement is palpable when he talks about Norman’s Nursery and projects in the area. “The Coachella Valley operation is my favorite place to go,” he says. “The quality of the drought-tolerant plants, trees, and shrubs in Mecca is extraordinary. It makes them perfectly suited for the Valley. The result is that we’ve got 20-foot-tall mesquites and 20-foot-tall Texas ebonies – a lot of sizable, statement-making trees in the middle of the desert. There’s a very specific plant palette of what will survive out there and what will thrive. And we’ve been successful at it.”
Grace says throughout the spring, as they engaged in more and more projects throughout the Valley, he received tremendous feedback from homeowners. “Now that we’ve got our doors open, you can come directly to us and pick out the exact tree, the exact line of shrubs, the exact trophy agave that you want for your home, and we’re going to have it,” he says. “And we’re going to put your name on it, and then we’re going to get it to your house and get it planted exactly how you want.” And that’s been the key to Norman’s success for nearly 80 years.
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Norman’s Nursery, Mecca
92477 National Ave.
Mecca, CA 92254
(626) 285-9795
