San Marcos Growers: Where the Big Trees Roam

Toward the end of a tour around San Marcos Growers, the nursery’s general manager, Randy Baldwin, indicated an old, twisted fig tree growing by the greenhouses. “Cuttings from this tree have been planted all around Santa Barbara,” he said, mentioning a few locations, one of them immediately familiar: the corner of State and Figueroa Street where the tree with its button-shaped fruit and gnarled branches shares a planter at La Arcada with a brass fox.

San Marcos Growers has supplied generations of trees and plants to Santa Barbara and to contractors and professional landscapers throughout California for going on 45 years. Set in the Eastern Goleta Valley, the nursery is an agricultural oasis on busy Hollister Avenue. It sells on a wholesale basis only, with no retail sales, but some of its regulars are Disneyland and Lotusland, Baldwin said, as well as UC Santa Barbara. He employs about 50 sales and nursery staffers, growing the plants from seedlings and cuttings. Some of the trees on the property have been in the ground for a half century or more.

I’d come to see the giants, but it’s spring — as the wisteria growing along Highway 101 attests. What kept catching my eye were the unusual patterns to the branches and leaves of the plants at the nursery, and the incredible colors they displayed. Baldwin easily recalled their Latin and common names — as well as how they were spelled.