Recession Blamed For Southern Nursery Shortages
June 10, 2015 | 1 min to read
Few sights are as quintessentially New Orleans as a street lined with mossy live oaks or a graceful Southern magnolia in bloom. It may come as a surprise, then, that shortages have made those trees some of the hardest — and priciest — to plant in the region.
The Great Recession battered wholesale nurseries in the South and nationwide, with demand for trees, shrubs and plants taking a nosedive as the housing market soured.
Sales of horticultural specialties, including nursery crops, fell from $16.6 billion in 2007 to $14.5 billion in 2012, according to a 2014 report by Texas A&M University agricultural economist Charlie Hall.
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