Nels Melgaard said the Nursery at Mount Si started from a simple sign, planted 17 years ago: “Plant Sale, 1 Mile.”

Melgaard’s nursery has arguably the best view of the mountain from a North Bend businesses’ doorstep, but he said that wasn’t planned because, frankly, neither was his award-winning business.

In search of land, Melgaard and his wife, Anne, a school teacher, moved here from Maple Valley in the early 1980s. They began Fortune Farms, an organic produce farm, and transitioned into ornamentals and away from farmers markets around the time their second child was born.

“Even years before when I started the nursery,” Melgaard began, “when I moved out here, I had about three trailer-loads of pots in my front yard of things I dug from my other property, so people were stopping, right as we moved in (and asking), ‘Are you starting a nursery or something?’ It wasn’t even really on my radar.

“I was working construction at the time and selling real estate and then I met some people who had a small, organic vegetable farm and I got some greenhouses… it just evolved. I never set out with a business plan… it just happened.”

The nursery sources its plants almost exclusively from mom-and-pop growers in Oregon, what he described as the “mecca” of commercial, wholesale nurseries. Melgaard said they’re a grower-direct nursery, which means they take rooted cuttings and repot them. People can also bring their own pots and wish lists and they’ll make specialized displays.

He’s quick to note that working in a nursery isn’t spending your days smelling the roses. Melgaard said they make 90 percent of their income from March to June and described a typical work day as a high-maintenance retail environment.

People “think it’s kind of passive and you just get to tip-toe through the tulips, but it’s ball-busting, constant work… You’re fighting the elements all the time. North Bend’s very unforgiving at times and we get stuck in the wet and rain.”

When asked why he thinks the Valley has been so receptive to the nursery, he said it’s thanks to his knowledgeable staff, although he said the support of his wife’s stable income during the economic downturn kept his business from going under.

He also organizes summer concerts and evening events to keep the community engaged.

“(The nursery’s) kind of a minor institution, I guess,” he stated. “We’ve got a great customer base, but it’s a tough business… We’re the upper-Valley plant place, and we don’t take that for granted.”