Morris Newlin’s Successes, Succession and Retirement

Matt Hunter, Morris Newlin and Conrad Hayter

Morris Newlin’s

Successes, Succession and Retirement

Morris Newlin of New Garden Landscaping & Nursery has retired after 43 years, during which time he was an integral part of the North Carolina green industry. He will hand off the reins to Matt Hunter, who has served as the company’s President since 2017, and Conrad Hayter, a former President of the company.

Newlin, who has been focusing on business development and serving legacy customers for the past several years, decided the time was right to retire.

“Conrad, along with the New Garden executive team of Vera Gardner, Doug Berlin and Matt, had already pretty much been leading the company in recent years,” said Newlin. “So this seemed like the right time.”

Hunter and Hayter have lengthy histories with the company. Hayter had known the Newlin family for many years when he started as an account manager at New Garden in 2005.

“The family connection was really important to me,” said Hayter. “New Garden was like an extension of my own family.”

Hayter himself brought Hunter onto the team. “We met for breakfast one day, and he asked me if I’d be interested in coming to work for New Garden,” recalled Hunter. “So I came to New Garden through my friendship with Conrad. I didn’t realize, though, that we’d end up as business partners in the long run.”

Building a Business

The origins of the company go back to the 1960s, when Newlin’s father started a landscaping business in the family’s backyard.

“As far as the start of the business goes, it was really my dad’s backyard nursery,” said Newlin. “My brother and I grew up in that environment.”

A few years after graduating college in the mid-1970s, Newlin had the opportunity to start his own company when a real estate developer he was working for laid off much of its grounds maintenance staff, whom he then hired for his own venture.

“We started New Garden Landscaping & Nursery out of my own backyard in 1977,” Newlin said. “We grew from a mostly maintenance and landscape operation and later added retail and other services.”

From there, the business expanded. In 1979, Newlin opened a retail nursery on Highway 220 in Summerfield. In 1984, he opened a seasonal open-air retail location operated out of a gazebo, known appropriately as The Gazebo. Today the company has 124 employees.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Morris was involved with state-level landscape and nursery organizations, including North Carolina Nursery & Landscape Association (NCNLA). His participation led to serving on the board of the American Nursery & Landscape Association (ANLA) in the 2000s and guiding the merger of ANLA with OFA, a combined entity now known as American Hort. He still considers his time working with NCNLA to be one of the most important experiences of his career.

“The most important time for me, in terms of growth in and knowledge of the industry, was when I was on the board with Tom Bland, Michael Currin and others,” said Newlin. “The North Carolina Landscape Association held retreats, and our families got very close — it was valuable time together where you could just let your guard down and talk about anything. The people I was working with helped me set my bar much higher.”

Keeping the Vision Going

Throughout the years and the many changes it has undergone, New Garden Landscaping & Nursery has remained committed to being a responsible corporate citizen, getting the best results for its customers, and finding and keeping the best employees.

“The thing I’m most proud of is the people we’ve been able to attract, in terms of leadership, skill and passion,” said Newlin.

“I always felt like I didn’t want to be the biggest company — I just wanted to be the best company,” added

Newlin. “And to me, part of that is being able to have a customer for life. I can’t tell you how many customers for whom we’ve landscaped their business, their home, their church and even their children’s home.”

As Hunter sees it, part of taking New Garden into the future will be maintaining that commitment to the staff.

“We have at least a dozen employees who have been with us more than 20 years,” he explained. “It speaks volumes for what Morris built for this company, and we’ve just been very blessed.”

Hayter, for his part, sees areas for new growth.

“We want to grow, but we want to be very strategic with our growth,” he explained. “We don’t want to go out and just start adding services — we want to be able to add higher-value services like irrigation and lighting.”

In terms of the future of the business, Newlin is content with where things stand now.

“I wanted to see the business continue as a family business or a small business because the people in that company are so important to me,” he said. “I wanted to see a team with active owners who were ready to lead the company into the future. And that’s pretty much where I feel like we’ve landed, which is a good spot.”

We started New Garden Landscaping & Nursery out of my own backyard in 1977.

7801 Clinard Farms Road High Point, NC 27265

WWW.GOSSETTSNURSERY.COM

(336) 454-2548

1-800-487-2555

sales@gossettsnursery.com

Located: 5 miles west of Greensboro, on NC 68, two miles south of I-40

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