Hillside Nursery, which looks more like a park than a business, celebrates 100 years

There aren’t many businesses so invitingly idyllic that you’d want to pop by with a sack lunch, plop down on a vintage glider and escape reality over your lunch hour.

You can at Hillside Nursery. Tall trees line the front of its 8 acres at 2200 S. Hillside, making it appear more like a mini arboretum than someplace where financial transactions occur.

“You almost take a deep breath when you come here,” said co-owner Katie McHenry.

“Everyone that comes in, particularly first-time people, want to come back. There is no question.”

Just past a stone-and-wrought-iron fence, there are even taller trees — some older than the business — and smaller ones for sale in purposefully alluring arrangements.

Red wooden buildings dot the property, giving an air of a summer camp for budding forest rangers.

One building is from 1925 — or was it ’26? — when Fred Schnitzler started the business.

Since the scion of Wichita pioneer Fritz Schnitzler isn’t around to say, the McHenry family, who bought the business in 1947, is relying on what’s been passed down through the decades and choosing to celebrate the nursery’s centennial this year.

The late R.E. “Bob” McHenry, or Mr. McHenry as he was known to most, purchased Hillside Nursery from Fred Schnitzler.

McHenry’s grandsons, brothers Mark and Matt McHenry, now run the business and share ownership with Katie McHenry, their mother, who probably is best known for her time as principal of South and then East high schools.

Except for helping on some busy weekends, she worked outside the nursery while her husband, Greg, ran it.

“We call her the Hillside Nursery greeter, like the Walmart greeter,” Mark McHenry said.

Greg McHenry, who unexpectedly died in 2015 at age 69, and his siblings grew up on the property in a small 1920s house that’s now the nursery’s office.

Greg and Katie McHenry’s children grew up in a Brady Bunch-like house adjacent to the property that’s now out of the family. The nursery was their backyard.

“It was magical,” said Mark McHenry, who today is president of the business.

“It was 8 acres of playground as a kid.”

There was a basketball hoop, fields for football and baseball, and his grandfather built a pool on the property “right here in the middle of what’s now our perennial garden.”

Marshall McHenry, another of R.E. McHenry’s sons, said he remembers neighborhood kids coming over with floaties and rubber duckies.

“Nobody invited them. They just showed up.”

Mark McHenry started working at the nursery at about age 10 for 25 cents an hour, but he never expected to make it a career.

The poly-sci major at K-State thought he wanted to be lawyer. He said there was no pressure for him or his siblings to follow in the footsteps of their father and grandfather.

“It took getting away from the family business for a time to appreciate it,” McHenry said.

So what brought him back?

“The joy you get out of making people happy.”

‘Grown at home’

Without much fanfare, farmer Fred Schnitzler went into the nursery business sometime around 1925.

There are no newspaper articles or other records to prove an exact date. His 1979 obituary said it was 1925, but other accounts point to 1926.

The first newspaper mention of Hillside Nursery’s existence appears to be a 1928 advertisement for trees “Grown at home.”

It was truth in advertising since the Schnitzler family lived on the property in the same house where R.E. McHenry eventually moved his family.

According to Marshall McHenry, Fred Schnitzler was more of a farmer and grower and didn’t enjoy dealing with the public. He became so tired of it, he offered to sell the business to McHenry, and they made a handshake deal.

McHenry had been working as a material buyer for Boeing during World War II while selling fruit trees out of the trunk of his car until he leased a one-acre plot at Hillside and Zimmerly to open McHenry Nursery. He then left the plot and the name when he acquired Hillside Nursery.

Schnitzler went on to start Schnitzler Wholesale Nursery, which he ran until 1973.

“He grafted and reproduced juniper seedlings, which are known as Wichita Blue and Wichita Green Junipers, and are widely used throughout the country,” the obituary said.

As popular as they became elsewhere, they didn’t thrive in Wichita’s climate. The Wichita Green is almost extinct. Still, the McHenrys propagate various junipers, including the Wichita Blue that Mark McHenry said “we brought back just to keep the legacy going.”

In a 1937 article Schnitzler wrote for The Wichita Eagle headlined “Why We Landscape,” he discussed the joy good landscaping can bring — the same idea Mark McHenry echoed almost 90 years later.

“The enjoyment of others ought to be an inspiration for us to be more careful in our landscaping,” Schnitzler wrote. “For after all there is no greater pleasure than the pleasure of bringing joy to the hearts of others. And certainly it is a great joy to walk in a well planned and well kept garden.”

A transformation

During R.E. McHenry’s reign at Hillside Nursery, he transformed the business.

“He was just so passionate about it,” Marshall McHenry said. “Completely dedicated, 24-7.”

Though family members said the patriarch was wonderful — a generous, curious man — they said he also was formidable.

“He was a very . . . no-nonsense, very hard-charging, very difficult man to work with,” Mark McHenry said.

“He would attempt to tell me what to do,” Katie McHenry said. “In fact, he told me once I was sweeping the floor the wrong way.”

Outside the family, McHenry was known for his nursery catalogs, which were “so much more than just a price list,” Marshall McHenry said.

“Anybody interested in horticulture should read one of his catalogs. . . . It was more like a book.”

He said the nursery was the first in the area to staff landscape architects.

“That was just something that was unheard of.”

By 1950, R.E. McHenry purchased 240 acres a mile south of Derby to start a tree farm.

There are burr oaks along Spring Creek there — not for sale, in part because they’re too large to be transplanted — and there are adjacent fields on higher land for growing almost 100 varieties of trees that will one day be for sale.

Back at the nursery, there often were spontaneous Sunday cookouts with kegs of beer and lots of musical instruments. There’s still a bit of that today, too.

McHenry said his father, whose grandparents came from Lebanon, particularly loved immigrants.

“Dad never met anybody whose name ended in a vowel that he didn’t get to know.”

Katie McHenry said that “the Lebanese community and the old people of Wichita have really, really supported the nursery.”

“It’s a family operation, and it continues to be a family operation, and the people who come in are a part of them.”

Making it work

Though R.E. McHenry was a presence at the nursery until his 1999 death at age 78, Greg McHenry officially took over in the 1980s, and the atmosphere became more relaxed.

Katie McHenry said she’s sure he had hard times, “But Gregory being Gregory, the gentle soul he was, he just made it work.”

It was during the 1980s and ’90s that the nursery began doing more commercial landscaping at places such as Boeing and the Wichita Art Museum.

For the last two decades, 90% of the new tree introductions at Bartlett Arboretum in Belle Plaine have come from Hillside Nursery.

“That’s pretty staggering,” said Bartlett steward Robin Macy.

She has strong relationships with a number of nurseries, but Macy said Hillside Nursery is special, in part because it grows trees already adapted to Kansas, “which is really harsh.”

There’s a Shawnee Brave Bald Cypress planted at Bartlett Arboretum as a memorial to Greg McHenry.

His obituary said the nursery was his gift to his family and to all of Wichita, but it also acknowledged his personality.

“Gregory Martin McHenry, 69, told his last hilariously inappropriate tale on September 5, 2015.”

In addition to his own horticulture knowledge, Greg McHenry hired John Firsching.

Firsching’s father was the legendary superintendent of Wichita’s Landscape & Forestry Division, but Firsching didn’t think he wanted to follow his dad into the industry.

European travels changed that, piquing his interest in plants and birds. Upon his return, Firsching created a large organic herb garden at his parents’ home, which happened to be next to the nursery.

“Greg came over the fence one day and said, ‘Well, would you like to come over and work with us?’ ” Firsching said.

He began working there but kept traveling in the off season. Firsching joined full time in 1981 and now, at age 77, is attempting to retire — and not doing a great job of it — by working only 35 hours a week.

“He really is an enormous encyclopedia of plant material for them,” Macy said. “He has the deepest well of knowledge because it’s in his DNA.”

Material world

Firsching said Hillside Nursery is a different place under Mark and Matt McHenry than their father, noticeable in the amount of inventory they stock year round.

Their father “would not be happy with that,” Firsching said. “We used to think about July the Fourth was the cutoff date.”

Nor would Greg McHenry offer discounts like his sons do, Firsching said.

Mark McHenry remembers things a little differently. Though the nursery may carry more varieties these days, he remembers his father always saying that “you can’t sell from an empty wagon.”

“Dad isn’t rolling over in his grave, I guarantee you.”

Not unlike his grandfather, Mark McHenry “is formidable in a different way,” his mother said.

“Mark is more adventuresome. . . . Mark is far more . . . challenging of the status quo.”

Matt McHenry said the nursery business is more complicated than when his grandfather ran Hillside Nursery.

For instance, there might have been two types of oak trees in the ’50s.

“Now you have 120,” he said. “There’s just so much there now trying to figure out what people want.”

Mark McHenry said it’s also about striking a balance between what people want and what can do well in Kansas.

Today, business is split between selling trees, shrubs and flowers and doing landscaping, about half of which is commercial and the other half residential.

“Competition has grown exponentially, obviously, but we try to differentiate ourselves,” Mark McHenry said.

“We’re plantsmen. . . . We’re not selling hoses and yard art and all that stuff.”

That makes a year like this year particularly challenging. The city is in Stage 2 drought restrictions and has advised people this isn’t the year to buy trees.

McHenry and fellow nursery owners met in March to strategize what to do, including how to convince people that planting trees in times like this is more important than ever.

“The business is holding it’s own,” McHenry said. “I wouldn’t say we’re lighting the world on fire this year.”

He said weather always is the No. 1 concern.

Working with family sometimes can be a concern, too.

“If you haven’t been in a family business, then you probably have no idea,” Matt McHenry said. “It can be challenging, but it’s very rewarding in the end.”

Loyal following

Today, the same people who used to tag along with their grandparents to shop at Hillside Nursery are bringing their own grandkids.

There’s a reason for customer loyalty, said Wichitan Melissa Cohlmia, whose father bought plants from the nursery in the ’60s and whose children use its services today.

Greg McHenry impressed Cohlmia that he was the one in her yard planting or overseeing the work.

“I mean, here’s the guy who owned the place.”

Today, she said she simply texts Mark and Matt McHenry if she needs help with something in her yard.

“They’re incredible.”

Now, there’s a fourth generation at the nursery: Mark McHenry’s son, Jack, runs a landscaping crew for the business.

Mark McHenry said he envisions Hillside Nursery continuing for decades to come, even if it doesn’t stay in the family.

The official 100-year celebration is June 7 and 8 at the nursery.

Marshall McHenry said its longevity is the lasting goodwill his father created with the community that carries on today.

“It’s a Wichita treasure,” he said. “It is like a working park that doesn’t cost the taxpayer any money.”