IT'S LIKE a sauna in the propagating greenhouse behind Paul Grimm's farm homestead in Welsford, just outside Berwick, where a number of employees are carefully transplanting rooted cuttings of shrubs into dozens of flats.

In a couple of years these tiny cuttings will be viable plants, being shipped out from Springvale Nurseries, Grimm's family-owned company, to garden centres and landscapers throughout Atlantic Canada.

In high season, when the operation is in full swing, as many as 60 people work at the farm and the three retail outlets around mainland Nova Scotia. But the company has its roots in the family of Paul Grimm, who believes in creating an opportunity out of a setback and who has made a career of doing just this.

Mr. Grimm is the founder of the business and manages "the big picture part of Springvale; long-term and strategic planning, production manager. . . . But every day is a different day with different and continuous tasks to do." With more than 100,000 container plants, including perennials and shrubs and field-grown trees, being produced each year, it's small wonder that Mr. Grimm is always on the road, on the phone, or checking his stocks of plants.

Grimm's daughter, Cathy Oulton, manages day-to-day operations, human resources, the sales office and administration, as well as managing director at the nursery. Daughter Sally O'Neill concentrates on marketing and sales, trade shows, public relations and customer service.

They are all quick to point out that they are perfectly capable of performing any of the tasks at the company. Ms. Oulton wryly says her first job was hoeing in the fields as a young teen for $3 an hour, "which when you're a teenager is super-good money and beats babysitting for $1 an hour!"

Mr. Grimm's wife, Nancy, is now retired after ill health several years ago, but she was formerly a master pruner and used to cook dinner for everyone who worked at the company.

Springvale Nurseries rose phoenix-like from the ashes of a devastating fire 20 years ago. At the time, Mr. Grimm and his family operated the top-producing dairy herd in the province as well as a U-Pick apple orchard. When the dairy barn burned, as he tells it, "there wasn't enough insurance money to rebuild the dairy operation, so we wanted to use what resources were here."

What Mr. Grimm calls his eureka moment came when a landscape contractor mentioned the lack of a nursery growing trees for the landscape market. "I thought to myself, I like growing trees - we had apple trees, after all - so that's how it began."

Within a year, Mr. Grimm had researched and gone on trips to meet other growers and began growing his first field of trees. Very soon afterward they began propagating trees and shrubs, launched a container production and "started sales and marketing before we actually had anything of our own to sell."

It obviously takes a few years for trees to grow to a salable size, so Grimm was buying product and reselling it in order to build a market for the time when his own trees were ready to be sold. The family bought parcels of land one step at a time and gradually expanded the business.

Since the company's beginning, Springvale has been a wholesaler, providing plants exclusively to landscapers, nurseries and garden centres around Atlantic Canada. But the past few years has seen a complete change in the landscape of garden centre sales.

Formerly private, independent centres were the only source for plants for both landscapers and home gardeners, supplied by wholesalers like Springvale, which is the largest wholesaler of locally grown stock in Atlantic Canada. In the past few years the big box and chain stores entered this market, and while some of these were originally Springvale customers, they have gone to other wholesalers because they are looking for the cheapest price, not necessarily the best quality plants or those grown to survive in a Maritime climate.

Cancellation of a large contract by a big box store leaves a wholesaler like Springvale with many more units of a particular type of plant than a half a dozen smaller garden centres are apt to want. What does a nursery wholesaler do then? Go into the retail market themselves.

In 2004, "as an act of necessity," Mr. Grimm and his team took Springvale into the retail sector. The company rented the Shaffner's Greenhouses property in Hammonds Plains last year (they have recently purchased this site) and he and his daughters have high praise for the community support they have received.

There are a number of garden centres throughout Hammonds Plains, both niche and general, as well as complementary businesses for the landscape trade, and all appear to be thriving. Encouraged by the customer response, this year has seen the development of two new sites: Coupar's Nursery in Bible Hill is now a Springvale retail outlet, and a newly built garden centre on the Wheaton's Christmas Tree Farm and country store property opened in late May.

Entering the retail market has been a slow-but-steady growing success, Mr. Grimm says. "When we decided to venture into retail, it was driven by necessity but is running now out of passion and opportunity. We love what we're doing there and see a huge chance to grow our locations and our clientele.

"We don't have an 'Oh, poor us' mentality; we can't control the weather or changing markets, but what we can do is grow great plants, and because we've got that agricultural background, we don't give in easily. Plus we have a terrific staff with great commitment to what we're doing, so that tells us we're on the right track."

While Springvale Nurseries concentrate on propagating, growing and selling already existing varieties of plants, Mr. Grimm is slowly working on developing some special plant varieties that show serious promise as great garden plants, but this sort of development takes time. "Our focus to now has been on growing top quality plants, and we don't specialize in any one thing because this is too small a market to have large growing operations that specialize, as occurs in Toronto or around Chicago. But we're always evolving, growing like our plants."