If you could afford to hire someone to cut your lawn, trim your privet hedges and fluff up your flower beds in 1980, at $8 an hour you might have chosen Nicholas Ferrantella and his lone employee.

ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent It keeps growing and they keep trimming it. Privet hedge, the perennial moneymaker for landscapers islandwide is a metaphor for the industry that helps to keep more than 130 landscapers and related business busy in what many believe is a $100-million industry employing numerous Nantucketers. Nearing the end of his time touring with the band Foreigner as its road manager, Ferrantella had been casting about for something to do after playing in a rock and roll band.

"I wanted to get off the road," Ferrantella said this week. "I was married, I had a family and I wanted a place to settle down. You can kind of burn out on it, but I didn't dream that landscaping would turn into such a great business; I was just looking for something to do locally."

Although Nantucket's next building boom was still six years away when Ferrantella started mowing lawns, the demand was there even then for yard maintenance. Ferrantella guesses that there were around eight landscapers on the island at that time, including the late Russell Pope and Albert Glowacki (now called G & M Landscape Services). "It was just the basic landscape maintenance; mowing and trimming and cleanup," he said. "It was myself and another guy that I hired - one truck and a trailer. I had zero (customers when I started). But by the end of the first season, I had 28."

PHOTOS BY ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent Two, two-man landscaping operations germinated two of the island's largest and longest running lawn and garden operations - the 'Sconset Gardener, above left, and; Nicholas Ferrantella Landscaping, above right. Marty McGowan, far right with sunglasses in the left photo, started out in 1974 offering the basics of lawn care including cutting, trimming and planting. Now his crew numbers above 50 employees from 16 countries. His business covers all aspects of landscaping. Ferrantella, far right in the right photo sitting in a green chair, began much the same way in 1980, opening for business with one worker. Twenty-seven years later and he needs more than 20 employees, including several Bulgarians and at least three family members to keep up with his all of his accounts. Both landscapers began by charging less than $10 an hour for their services. Landscaper Marty McGowan, the 'Sconset Gardener, launched his business in a fashion similar to Ferrantella's in 1974, becoming a full-service landscaper from the beginning.

"I mowed the lawns, did the hedges, did the gardens, planted the trees - whatever anybody wanted," McGowan said.

Ferrantella, McGowan and more than 130 landscapers and related specialized yard services are proof that in the early years of the 21st century on Nantucket the grass is not only always better coiffed on the other side of the fence (or the fence beyond that), but accented with an everchanging palette of trendy accoutrements.

"We've gone from doing basic maintenance to doing patios, walls, waterfalls and ponds. We've built some woodland streams, and some with waterfalls and brooks," said Ferrantella. "People in general do a lot more hardscaping (brickwork, patios, walls, blue stone, stone barbeques) than when I got into the business. In the early years, people weren't as tuned in to that."

Landscapers would probably agree that an influx of money during the building boom years, combined with the island's desire to expand its seasonal economy deep into both shoulder seasons, played a key role in the growth of Nantucket's landscape and garden industry. With that came the need to get the work done quickly and more efficiently, while satisfying homeowners' varied tastes and desires.

The solution came in the form of new machines for sculpting soil and trimming vegetation, and in an endless, evolving labor pool from the U.K. and later from the Caribbean, then Central and South America, and Eastern Europe.

"With the world economy has come the world employee pool," said McGowan, who believes that industrywide on Nantucket, most landscapers employ a staff of at least 50 percent Latinos. "I have 16 countries on my crew, and I've had as many as 20. I think that if you took the average landscape company that has five or more employees, I think you would have two or more countries represented."

THAT HIGH SCHOOL JOB

Ferrantella has a fairly good idea of when the landscaping industry erupted on Nantucket - when his business went from allowing him to supplement his landscaping income with his island music career, to dominating his life. And again, when it splintered off from we-do-it-all landscaping into specialized services.

"I have a feeling it was the midto late '80s," he said. "That's when it started for me. That's when I noticed the demands were more than I could do. There was a little slowdown in 1983 . . . and then I got the contract for the new high school."

Given the opportunity to build the new fields and landscape the grounds of the newly renovated and expanded high school put Ferrantella among the island's landscaping elite, and gave him the confidence to keep going.

"That was kind of a turning point for my business, because it made people aware that we could do that," he said. "It grew quickly for me. I just sort of self-educated myself."

McGowan concurs, recalling that his business really took off island-wide when the needs of the new islanders went far beyond just simple yard maintenance and plantings.

Every island boom in landscaping and gardening, McGowan believes, parallels resurgences in building architecture, starting with the whaling era and followed by a period of economic prosperity from 1910 through the crash of 1929, and then the development of Nantucket as resort destination by Walter Beinecke, Jr. starting in the mid-1960s.

"I believe that the economic factors happened cyclically. If you look at them, they're all driven architecturally," said McGowan. "Nantucket got built during the Federal and Victorian eras, and the next big building boom was the summer cottage time in the 1920s. Now here we are 60 years later having a big boom."

Although neither Ferrantella nor McGowan would reveal their hourly billing rates, the most accurate estimate based on their services puts them between $45 and $60 per hour.

By all estimates, the business of landscaping and gardening on Nantucket is a multi-million dollar industry - likely in the hundreds of millions. It has obviously yet to top out.

ORGANIC JEWELRY

Once it got rolling in the mid-to-late-1980s, Nantucket's landscaping industry blossomed like a field of wildflowers, with all manner of specialized services shooting up to meet the new needs of both seasonal and year-round residents.

"People started building really expensive houses," said Ferrantella. "They had a lot more money to spend. After that early-'80s slowdown, things took off. The second homes that people built here weren't little cottages anymore. They were trophy homes. They had to have bricks and the blue stone and the patio and the pool. The stonework is really the most noticeable change, but now nobody really builds without an irrigation system either."

The germination of new customers for landscapers and gardeners came not only by word of mouth and referrals - McGowan has seldom advertised - but also from the American dynamic of keeping up with the Joneses.

"All those shiny magazines, you know what is funny about landscaping?" said McGowan. "You open these shiny magazines and you see this amazing property and people want that."

Landscape architects such as David Bartsch were able to elevate landscaping and gardening on the island to a finer scale, a very expensive one for property owners with the means to re-create utopias on the Cliff, the 'Sconset Bluff or on the edges of the moors. Bartsch shares Page 174 of the Nantucket Phone Book with just two other landscape architects, both based off island.

He said that discerning island property owners hire him for the kind of expertise that he believes cannot be had at the hands of landscape designers, of which there are 16 listed under that category. Much like the rigors of becoming a building architect, in addition to college degrees, landscape architects must perform a two-year internship, take a 36- hour exam and be licensed by the state, said Bartsch, who believes his mission on Nantucket is to blend the build-out of the island into its natural surroundings.

"I think it's (landscaping) changing in the people who are coming to the island," said Bartsch, who also designed the new roundabout for the town. "It used to be that people would come to the island and take off their jewelry, and now they come to the island and put it on.

"I think that because where there's more building going on where it didn't used to be, there's a greater need for expertise, and there's a greater need to integrate the new building into the context of the island."

RISE OF THE MACHINES

With hardscaping, giant lawns and earth shaping on a grand scale came the need for new technology to do the work. Where once there were push mowers, simple ride-on mowers and electric hedge trimmers, there are now a whole invasion of gadgets and larger machines capable of doing the job with greater efficiency yet much more noise (see related story).

Brooms have been replaced with gas-powered leaf blowers. Hand-held grass trimmers were supplanted by motorized weed whackers and, to a larger extent, by Bobcat front-end loaders.

When Ferrantella began, he subcontracted Frank Powers' tractor for earth moving. Now smaller tractors and Bobcats are in many more landscapers' arsenals.

Additionally, tree spades of several sizes that have found their way to the island, can unearth small to medium trees and bushes, and move them to new locations. For hedge trimming, Ferrantella replaced his electric hedge trimmers powered by generators with gas-engine trimmers. His crew of 22 does, however, still use brooms.

"I try not to use any leaf blowers if I can," he said. "I don't send them out with my maintenance crews. Some of the mowing equipment machines are better, though. I had push mowers, and then we had larger sit-on mowers."

BACKBONES AND BICEPS

While U.S. college students and a sprinkling of Irish and U.K. youth did the work in the boom years of the mid-'80s through the early 1990s, the backbone and biceps of the landscaping industry on Nantucket in the last decade and today come from places like El Salvador, Brazil and Bulgaria.

Maximo Tejada of El Salvador, one half of Tejada Brothers Landscaping and Gardening Service, helped start his own landscaping business because the pay was better than working for someone else. He estimates that there are five or six other Latino-owned landscaping businesses on Nantucket right now.

"I was making $10 an hour, and then I started working for people who wanted me to do work for them and they paid me double what I was making (working for someone else)," said Tejada, who opened his business in the year 2000 billing at $20 an hour.

He now bills his 20 customers at $45 an hour. But as a business owner, Tejada is in the minority among the island's Central Americans and workers from other countries. Ferrantella, who employs several family members, also hires Bulgarian students.

"Before, we really relied on college students to fill out our employees," said Ferrantella.

But now, in addition to a sprinkling of college kids, Ferrantella employs a broader demographic of laborers that includes Bulgarians, island residents of varying ages and his sons.

In addition to his son, Victor, who has been with him since high school, his other son, Ben, 18, who has been working for him summers since he was 15, and his grandson, Curren Huyser, 15, who is just starting this summer, Ferrantella hires the Bulgarians for several reasons.

"It benefits the small company because you don't have to pay as much taxes on them," he said. "They are more worldly. They want to work as many hours as you can give them, and they're very conscientious and courteous."

And while he supports Tejada and other legitimate landscape business owners, Ferrantella cautions property owners to be wary of those who employ illegal aliens.

"The homeowners can be held personally responsible if they're illegal," said Ferrantella. "Also, if they get injured on your property, you're responsible."

These so-called fly-by-night landscapers, said Ferrantella, dilute the cost of lawn and garden maintenance by undercutting above-board operations. And that, combined with a drop in real estate sales in 2006, could be why he is experiencing a slight lag in business.

"I've been fairly busy lately, but only because I've been around for so long," he said. "I've noticed it's been fairly competitive. Now, I'm getting 80 percent of what I got before. I think it's cut more into the maintenance business because a lot of them

don't do full landscaping." I