and welcome to another edition of design for the times my name is richard scary and i'm very happy today to have in studio two people that i've worked with before and they are from a wonderful place called rockers landscaping my first g much thank you guys for coming today this is very short notice so i appreciate you coming you know not much sort of surprises me anymore i've been through so much in my twenty year career with me even held designs but when i came into records landscape i was wowed i didn't see anything like this before it's such a i think that record landscape is an experience and you hear the word records landscape you think ok to the landscaping company but when you come in and it is it's its own i'd have to say its own entity its own thing so jim i defer to you on how you got started in this and you created something that i find is so different and so interesting and such an unusual space what was the impetus had to come about  the impetus is really to improve things and really like to improve people's properties when i was i believe i was a sophomore at rockers i had a part time job with a bunch of buddies from rockers where or so you're the cook camp at the agricultural we were and at that time we would work in highland park which was close proximity to assure we found very quickly that our employers were less reliable than we were and that's when i decided to start their own my own and just start knocking on doors of garage in my mother's house wonderful five miles away from the campus was not very popular at home ok i haven't had in central jersey yeah and other than the great so how did that sort of evolved you start picking up contracts with people they got to know you yeah i mean the whole when i first started everything we actually were a company called quality long care that i had started jim brophy big sign like everybody in schmall business seems to have their name on it and i guess about a year after i had all this work done on one truck i owned one of my customers said all the guys from rockers are here and i didn't realize that all right i had five or six guys or brokers that were helping me do the work and that's where the name got you know know i didn't know that until it is very moment very interesting so that to where you are today is just you know miles away from that so how did you grow bigger or did you defer to something else because i thought you were do you work or at one point i went to new york about fourteen years later ok for a little bit of a mental break and a real great experience in the or where i got to be around people that had my pain very big things going on so it just made me think bigger and bigger burnout is the smaller mentality having seen what you've done there it's so sophisticated i bet you had to go through that part of your life maybe with that new york experience with the best of the best and think things you know the other places in order to create the growth in that regard because your place guys this is i think it's high style it's very current it's very trending it's very and you're a big group there so how many for you joe and how many people do you got do you space the current space that you're in and what was it before was it land that was just needed to be cleared or well that's the whole history of it was if i go back to the university days sure two years after graduating i was still i went home with my dad passed away when i graduated when i'm  my mom briefly and saved a lot of money and did as much as i could and i realized that if i want to stay in this i have to make a move soon and i ended up long story short coming up to a horse show i have a barn that's right behind  the property i still have on with thirty one and there is a property there that's rocker's landscape design today it was basically you know for sale and it had eight acres and from a kid from madison acres was like oh my god right or that that kind of set the tone time i enjoyed myself so i'm going to live right funny thing people say then it's your landscape or i always felt like i was i made a goal to work on my business as well as in it and by that it's a  philosophy that you just look at your business a little bit from the outside he was trying to prove it right so going to new york was real risk to be you know an hour and a half away and i was going to learn how to make it work for the first four years all i did was have fun and write and he would say why do you live in new york i said well you just answered your own question right there i think everybody should live until you're a little say it and at that point you know things i did meet my now wife in two thousand and four i start to get a little bit more serious about you know where i want to go what i want to do and i just have to drive it home one day and i saw this gigantic sign for sale on route to a two about a half mile away it was a cornfield i called up a few people some people i knew very well that were in real estate and they said don't do it have a competitor right across the street it will be awful for you and then i called up a good friend an attorney of mine to this day bob ballard and his comments were you've got to do this it's the best thing you'll ever do and that's when i went and bought it and the rest is history it was worth so that's two thousand and five two thousand and five was bought a good two years to get approvals we opened in two thousand and seven so we're there a little over ten years now and i have actual merchandising must get incredible i my input to this was the overall concept and design how it should be laid out with parking lot and access and roads and walkways and was more top view of the details and how we've redone the store which you say wow all right that's jeff the layout it's doesn't look like a mom and pop nursery you know it's a well thought out interesting place to walk around almost an event space and yeah it's a little bit about that jim had this garden center so i started working for him part time for stuff my college degree and then came to work with him full time my degree was environmental but i had a lot of support and court and landscape classes prior to changing my degree over to environmental and it just seemed to fit it was a natural fit and i really enjoyed working with actors and i wanted to be outside and of course had by then worked for you  i live at nine hundred county to experience a jersey or rural area where people have beautiful beautiful properties and really know their their stuff so for you are you constantly learning or you constantly are new things i find exciting and we go to different trade shows and of course read and discuss among our peers and our fellow employees all the new and exciting things because we're all very much so into the industry and i would like to coin the phrase plant knowledge on something related to design i want to even if it's nothing to use you want that you want your arm really so you know you're aware of it again it seems to be changing and changing and ever changing as climate has a lot to do with maybe what you're purchasing now have you changed things after we had superstorm sandy are there things that you guys do differently now with all the weird environmental things that have been going on i would say no not really i think some of these are one offs remember two thousand and thirteen two thousand and fourteen we had incredibly cold winters and the coldest on record and the last couple years it's just it's hit or miss and you can't with certain plants you just have to protect them to do your best so said we'd make two and knowing how things are in the stand while having been through many many years of getting proper approvals and zoning sure i went gutter zoning permit in our building permit and made sure they were there when protected so they they've made it through s university which is great and all i have to do is say have you ever been on ritual to just say your producer today right you know where those yellow chairs are and they said i know exactly where you are so that actively mark or you know sometimes you have to do it your heart tells you to do because sometimes you have to go with your heart tells you to do you have to say ok very nice but i'm going to do what i want to do and things work themselves out you know i think the bigger deal is that when you when you walk into your space when you go beyond the yellow chairs the yellow chairs may find you there but what keeps you there is what you do in the space so when i'm talking about i had heard about you and i've never told you this before but i've heard about you long before i saw your facility because a friend of mine had some landscaping done it was just perfect not a big budget not a big property so well and i thought these people know what they're doing and i often say to people whether it be just staging the house to sell that you guys come in which you've done for me before clean up the bed or just put a home having a plan maybe you can even maybe you can't even afford all the plants yet but start with a plan don't you think most people make a mistake both financially and then with the outcome by not starting with a plan to give you a big secret if you don't have a plan you're going you're planning to fail you're going to fail right and to some degree we have different businesses we have guaranteed a new witty because people get very impulsive and this is a secret i hope they understand you can rush to judgment and want to plant everything you see that looks pretty right away where two or three years from now that annuity comes due and you're  back at our nursery and you're replacing or moving or you're finally saying you know what i'm going to get a plan now it's very true it's very much why people hire me as an interior decorator because they do everything they like but i have to be selected to say you plant you do this you do that you do this you do that you can do everything to your room in a way that you know and i think that's very wise and i think people should start with a plan i always tell people start with the player but doesn't always work out that way yeah do you think one of the biggest common mistakes is that people plant too much too close together absolutely i used to be way back in my early days i actually still now they have been doing this for thirty one thirty two years i have clients i work with my younger younger design team that i don't work with anymore with a command and we talk and we laugh and the they would joke that i was i put in wimpy plants back then and i spaced things so far apart right back then right there still coming to me twenty five years later you were ahead of him things i knew how things were going to grow no i didn't and as much as i say  mockingly that it's an annuity they're going to come back right who don't get a plan i don't want to see them do that if you get a plan and you get things spaced out properly it's you should get a good fifteen twenty years sure if you do it right because people are two or three years is just crazy now but if you have people want immediate gratification more than ever i was listening to a radio spot in the car on the way home they said they now have pasta that cooks in a minute microwave pasta you put it in the water cooks and one minute you put your sauce up book two minutes you had it i think with planting that's what people want people say bought a house and have a house warming party i want a full guarded well if you have new construction where they subdivided a form that's not really going to that's not a realistic goal is it right so you want to do things the right way and one of the things that joe and you said to me when you came on my radio show is the importance of planning things that were right for the area right for euro zone and that will go also grow well together we say right plant right spot price that you know so you may love something that's not indigenous but maybe it's not the best thing for you to plant so i think you're very good at you want to do is maybe finding something that would be similar a statically but work well in our environment so i want to ask you starting with where we are in new jersey and central new jersey which is sort of selective for people to say north of you to the south i say central new zone seven used to be that just south jersey cape may was seven right it has changed they just put out a new us hardiness map recently and seven has actually encroached in areas of the shore area further north north but typically this area central new jersey a six be ok so when someone comes to you and they say oh what would be something that would be what would seem to be a point that would be terrible for six but anything tropical and the thing of course that doesn't tolerate  anything higher than a seven once you go into seven it's not hard to hear it has to be a six if you are going to do a seven is to come in for the winter it's considered an annual here and there are certain purple fountain grasses create i think that's how you have to be with live it's good you have to go to the professionals you have to come to you guys have a put in and say ok i want this particular player what's a good substitute sure and then you get the a static you want the color you want to put it thrives and you don't waste money i see so many clients that come to me and they've wasted their house and supine thousands of dollars because they planted one the wrong thing for their zone and two things too close together you know we have to just rip them out and was cool you know we had to rip things out  it's painful sometimes to see something that's flourishing but unfortunately it's not going to flourish for long because the competition's to fears and what you have to selectively remove something make room for the other plant to survive because if you don't both will  fail i see a lot of mistakes with people planting things too close together things that are going to get too big for the given space it was cute five years ago but now it's in their house and unfortunately there are there are some guidelines that you like to keep or hundreds that are on our farm and we can just fresh dig whatever you need anything that specifically that you grow there for your own place like everything ok and everything right now even in the fall we harvested this week i saw yesterday a lot of  permit now for my viewers we talked a little bit of beforehand about the beauty very i only found out about the beauty very because i did a photo shoot last year for a renovation i did in flemington where we just sort of got it a house and added outbuildings is a terrific job and they brought in beauty cutback and by the time you get to september october november it's it's the only thing we're digging at the farm besides those beautiful orange berry hollies and red berry how i didn't know the orange very holidays i was somewhere yesterday and i was like these are red these are orange i want to snag some of because it's beautiful but i don't see used as much i do think plants trend in general absolutely it's it frustrates the heck out of us because we're always we digging our maturing planning on trends and going to look at the numbers for sure  however you got to go with your gut and there's certain plants will you be hot for so long and that's why there's a glut in the market of certain plants and then the be absolute drought we can't find a certain species because everybody's going for we don't have a lot of time so when i want to have the answer that will be great you know maybe next time so i differ so let's talk about base plantings we don't have a lot of time left so let's talk about the five or six minutes we have left what's a good pace based planting for our know everybody does have that or you have an older house and you're starting fresh so what i'm saying is sort of sort of the that is a major point and then you know we can sort of supplement seasonally with the annual some things that we did with another baby good space but what about i great ideas that way and i did like sort of a collection around it collection of just dwarf boxwoods they were gorgeous but they did get one or two the first year had a little bit of a frost bite and i see a lot of people cover their box which are there some with some sort of to make sure the dollars count as you said bruce in the segment earlier you said that a good garden can last if it's planned to write how many years i would hope fifteen or twenty wows so it's worth it i think from the front end to do it right to rule and landscape to put it my grandfather looks like stubs it's gross right it is the best annual i have ever found in my life it goes in mass it starts to build it looks like roses it's purple the deer will walk around and eat something else i love it is there any sort of other plants like that they're like like a win to me as a raider is the best player i've ever found as an annual it gives me that purple look all summer long i have to rip it out at the end if i want to it goes into the fall it is just a great  plant it gives you a long continuation of summer color but then you really can fall contrast of all the edge and c m a green background wonderful will listen we're running out of time on to thank you both for coming give information once where we are located your phone eight i think you would offer those yellow chairs yeah look for the only yellow chairs i thank you so much for being our guest today and i thank you for tuning in to our new program design for the times has a lot of new programs planned for two thousand and eighteen and i thank you and have a wonderful day