• Submitted by: manso
• Editorial Articles
• 11 / 28 / 2010

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By John Nelander. Special to the Daily News. Updated: 6:43 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 27, 2010. More than five decades ago in a tiny backyard garden in Havana, Cuba, a young boy dropped some radish seeds into the warm soil. A week later, green sprouts had poked up and by the end of the month he was able to pull a fully formed radish out of the ground.

Eight-year-old Jorge Sanchez was hooked on gardening. “I sold the radishes and had a great time doing it,” he says.

Over the years, his hobby blossomed into a career and took root in a landscape design firm that has done big business in Palm Beach and elsewhere, from California to New York and into the Bahamas. Along with his partner, Phil Maddux, Sanchez & Maddux has put its stamp of creative gardening on both private homes and public gathering places.

They were the green team behind the recently completed Worth Avenue makeover, and helped the Garden Club of Palm Beach create the “living wall” at 150 Worth Avenue — a vertical showcase of textured foliage along the western side of Saks Fifth Avenue.

Sanchez and his exiled family came from Cuba to Palm Beach in 1959, after which they went into the sugar cane business. He attended local schools and went to Villanova University in Pennsylvania to study business, finance and history, with the intention of going to work for the family.

“I absolutely loved college. I come from a large family and they had gone away to boarding school, but there wasn’t the money. When I got around to going away to college, the Northeast held a huge attraction. I probably enjoyed it a lot more than I was supposed to.”

At first he joined the family in the sugar cane business but didn’t particularly like it. He was still an avid gardener, and a couple of friends in the interior decorating business asked him if he could put his passion to work for some of their clients.

That started him doing jobs for other people. Later, his family bought into a development, and Sanchez started coordinating the landscape design for that. The installer was Phil Maddux, and that’s how he became Sanchez’s business partner.

In his off time, Sanchez still does what he’s always liked best: picking out interesting plants and cultivating them. The garden at his house in Palm Beach is always evolving, and he and his wife, Serina, (they have two married sons) spend weekends at their ranch in northwestern Martin County. In the more wide-open spaces, he develops his own landscaping schemes as well.

He bicycles in Palm Beach; rides horses in Martin County.

A sometimes visitor at the Martin County ranch is Denis Coleman, who met Sanchez when he needed someone to design the landscaping at his house on Everglades Island. That was in the 1990s. A decade later, Coleman also had Sanchez do his home in the Hamptons.

“We’ve been good friends since then,” says Coleman. “He’s terrific at developing good bones on a project — details may change but there’s a good basic structure there. For him, it’s not only a vocation, it’s an avocation.”

Sanchez is good company and Coleman likes the fact that his friend is “honest and a little self-deprecating.” They talk about Cuba and sometimes one of Sanchez’s other favorite topics: economics.

When he reads — and Sanchez says he always has a book in progress — he likes to read books on banking or economic theory. He says he feels the economy is on the upswing, but adds: “My big fear, in terms of the bigger picture, is that we are a country that no longer produces.

“England was the best example. At the turn of the 20th century they were the leaders of the world by far. They convinced themselves that industry could go abroad and that it would be beneficial, because there would be lower wages. They became a financial center. But that lasted a couple of decades, and after the First World War they never recovered.

“We’re now a financial empire, but financial empires are always known to be very short-sighted. They don’t last because they don’t produce enough. That’s my fear.”

Like the rest of the U.S. business world, Sanchez has seen trends come and go. In the 1960s, queen palms were the rage. (These days, you probably won’t find a queen palm in Palm Beach.)


During their work on the Worth Avenue renovation, Sanchez and Maddux heard from two groups: One that was “absolutely dead set against coconut palms,” and another that insisted on them.

“The majority prevailed in the sense of bringing in the historical aspects of the area and reintroducing the coconuts,” says Sanchez. “Now that they’re in, the vast majority like them, although I’m sure there are still a few holdouts.”

He once took a liking to a flowering shrub called the Dombeya, originally from Venezuela. But they were ultra-rare. He finally found a small nursery in Jupiter Farms that grew them, and he started using them in his designs. They bloom from December to May, making them ideal for seasonal homeowners.

“Definitely plants go in and out of favor. There’s a vine we use a lot called a Chalice Vine, which is very pretty, but it went out of favor years ago. I found one growing over the roof of an old garage in town in an old estate. I took clippings of it and grew it at home. From there I gave it to a couple of nurseries to grow for me.”

South Florida, he says, has become a center for tropical nurseries with plants available here from throughout the world.

“Many of the nursery owners are plant collectors themselves and go to the ends of the Earth to find some of these plants,” he says. “So there’s an availability you don’t see elsewhere.”

Sanchez doesn’t believe the climate has changed much in Palm Beach, so he’s careful. He anticipates cold snaps. His general rule of thumb is to have 75 percent cold-hardy plants so that not everything is wiped out in the event of a killing freeze.

The last bad one was in 1989, although last winter came close.

“Last year we lost quite a bit of material in town,” Sanchez says. “There were some trees that were killed. Some varieties of coconuts held up better than others.

“In some cases entire nurseries were wiped out, even down in Homestead, and you can’t get any further south than that. But we have the Gulf Stream here and that helps.”

Source:www.palmbeachdailynews.com/news/