In the backyard of the house they rent in San Francisco's Golden Gate Heights neighborhood, when the fog dissipates and the sun shines down, John Alexander and Jai Alltizer have sweeping views of the churning waters of the Pacific Ocean and the city's oceanside neighborhoods. It is a prime spot for Alltizer to cultivate various roses, succulents, and other plants for their Alexander Nurseries business.
"I love the fog; I rarely break a sweat. It is a natural air conditioner," noted Alltizer, adding that it also provides benefits for his plants he propagates, keeping the cuttings moist. "They don't dry out quite as fast as would happen in a sunnier environment. It is an unusual microclimate for plant propagation out here."
He is partial to roses, with a favorite species being Gallicas, which are "incredibly fragrant," said Alltizer, and don't require a lot of maintenance. In particular, he is a fan of the Marianne Rose, a Gallica hybrid known for its apricot and peach color blend and strong fragrance.
"I have a passion for roses," said Alltizer as he showed off his plants one recent sunny morning to the Bay Area Reporter.
Alexander added, "I learned a lot from him about plants."
Domestic partners for two decades, these days they are more business partners, said Alexander, 46, who grew up in Durham, North Carolina where his family has long grown cotton and corn, as well as harvest timber, on a farm that he now co-owns with his three siblings.
Alltizer, 48, grew up in Sterling, Oklahoma on a ranch and had his own garden as a child. He moved to San Francisco in 2001 to take a job in costuming with the San Francisco Opera and has managed its costume shop since 2015.
Since childhood, he has always loved to get his hands dirty in the earth. Even if it is just spending time weeding his backyard, Alltizer said he enjoys being around plants.
"It is kind of its own therapy," he said.
On the East Coast, Alexander was a Reiki practitioner. But when he moved to California in 2003, he decided he no longer wanted to be tied to a massage table and opted for a new career in landscaping.
"If one thing we will need to the end of time, it is plants. And they don't talk back," quipped Alexander.
In 2008, Alexander enrolled at City College of San Francisco to learn about horticulture and landscape design. He has remained closely connected to the community college's horticulture department, helping to teach students over the years about the field.
Alexander co-designed new gardens and landscaping for the city's Laguna Honda Hospital in Forest Hill not far from where he now lives. He worked for almost seven years, until 2016, as a gardener for the medical facility and had obtained a $500,000 grant from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission for the project that resulted in a new drip irrigation system and drought tolerant, native plants on the medical campuses' front lawn.
His personal business has gone by different names over the years, from Gardens by John to JGA Garden Designs, until Alexander took on co-ownership of his family's farm following the death of his grandmother in 2015 and wanted to use a name tying his various business ventures on both coasts together. He provides garden design and installation services and ongoing maintenance in addition to the wholesale plant sales that Alltizer assists with as the company's official rose specialist.
Tend gardens
They are participants in the annual Portola Garden Tour, from which Alexander was the first design scholarship recipient roughly 16 years ago. Several of the gardens they tend to for clients are located in the San Francisco neighborhood.
When they moved out of the Mission District in 2011 into their new ocean view home, Alexander turned portions of the garage into spaces for the landscaping side of the couple's business and a workstation to prepare plants for shipping bought off their Etsy shop found at https://www.etsy.com/shop/AlexanderNurseries.
Amid the roses and other plants they tend to in their backyard is a small greenhouse for Alltizer to propagate plants requiring warmer temperatures than those provided by the chilly sea breezes that sweep in. Alltizer will take orders for custom grows of specific plants that clients request.
At one point, he had a three-year waiting list for a specific rose species he was cultivating, known as the Climbing Royal Sunset Rose, after one client several years ago bought all 35 of the plants he had. Normally, a custom cultivation will take him up to 16 months.
"You have to do a little bit of everything because not everybody wants the same thing," said Alltizer.
Their online sales have picked up due to the diverse plants they sell. Their landscape and garden work are cyclical, and will take a downturn during particularly rainy and wet seasons.
They were slammed during the COVID pandemic, when people were forced to work from home and wanted to upgrade their outdoor spaces. They grew to having a yearslong wait list for Alexander's garden design services but have since returned to a more normal backlog of two to three months.
"We gardened through the pandemic," said Alltizer, as performing arts groups like the opera were sidelined for several years by the health crisis.
In 2017, having run out of space at their home, they had leased a nursery in Sebastopol that had been used to grow roses but laid fallow for two years. The half-acre site "is a beautiful spot of sunshine," said Alexander, though it suffered some damage during the storms that blew into the Bay Area in mid-November.
Over the years they have had a booth at the farmers markets in the Castro and Inner Sunset neighborhoods. For a time, Alexander said, they were the lone business in San Francisco to hold an agricultural certified producer license.
An inspector with the San Francisco County Agricultural Commission, housed under the city's public health department, had inspected their home and backyard facilities as part of the application process. But they discovered being such a licensee was burdensome, as they were required to compile detailed lists of all the plants and edible crops like raspberry, strawberry, and herbal plants they planned to sell at the markets. If they forgot to list something, they couldn't sell it.
In 2020, they decided to pivot to a more artisan classification for the markets, under which they can bring potted arrangements to sell without the need for the city license. They intend to return to the Castro market when it comes back in 2025 after its winter hiatus, as well as the Inner Sunset one in the spring when their cut roses are in demand.
Today, they believe they are the only holders in San Francisco of a California agricultural nursery license. It doesn't have the same strict requirements as the producer license.
When not gardening, Alexander helps run the SF Eagles softball team and serves on the board of the San Francisco Softball League. He was inducted this year into its Hall of Fame and is helping prep local athletes for the 2026 Gay Games to be held in Valencia, Spain as vice president of Team San Francisco.
As for the key to his success off the sports field with his gardening design and nursery business, it is due to being responsive, said Alexander, to the landscape and plant needs of his and Alltizer's clients.
"It is more about us listening to what people want," explained Alexander when it comes to how they have grown and adapted their business over the years.
Alexander Nurseries can be found on Instagram at @alexander_nurseries. To contact it directly, call (415) 412-3371 or email [email protected]
Got a tip on LGBTQ business news? Call Matthew S. Bajko at (415) 829-8836 or email [email protected]
UPDATED 12/13/2024 to clarify they rent their Golden Gate Heights home and John Alexander grew up in Durham, North Carolina.
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