Forty Years In The Business: How Buck Jones Nursery Came To Be

I had the honor of talking to Mary Jane Jones, the widow of Buck Jones, on the phone before Christmas about their life, their family and reflections on 40 years in business.

During this 40^th Anniversary year, we at Buck Jones Nursery and Gardeners Helping Gardeners will be sharing stories of our founder, our employees and our goals for the future.

We owe a debt of gratitude to our customers and of course, to the man who had the vision that has carried this company through four decades, Mr. Buck Jones.

Forty years ago, a man and his wife stepped out on a limb and decided they would start a business. With a card table and some notepads, Buck and Mary Jane Jones ventured into an endeavor that would lead them places they never imagined.

Arthur A. “Buck” Jones always dreamed of having his own business. He’d been a hard worker all his life. He grew up as one of five children on a family farm and left a family of Georgia Bulldogs to go to Auburn University. He was bound and determined to study Veterinary Medicine but a visit to a family member’s nursery changed his mind and the farmer within him was inspired.

Auburn is where he met Mary Jane, interestingly through the head football coach at the time, Shug Jordan. Mary Jane and Shug’s daughter were best friends. Buck was strong and handsome and a talented athlete, but when he was asked by Coach Jordan to walk-on at Auburn, he went to a practice and decided he just wasn’t cut out for college football. He continued pouring all his time and effort into his schoolwork and starting his life with Mary Jane.

After they both graduated, Buck took a job with a landscape company in Augusta. He stayed there a short while and then moved to Atlanta to be a salesman with Sta-Green. In 1966, they moved to Sylacauga, Alabama to work at the home office for Sta-Green. They would be there until 1970. At the time, Mary Jane was teaching school and their family was growing.

In 1970, a friend from Athens called. His friend had a financial backer for a new business and offered to pay Buck what he and Mary Jane were making combined. She would be able to stay home and take care of the children. This particular job involved a lot of travel, meaning he normally stayed on the road from Sunday night until Friday. This put a lot of stress on the young, growing family. So he left and they moved to Grayson, GA, a sleepy town that back then seemed light years away from Atlanta (but is a close suburb now).

Buck knew a man in Atlanta, Don Nash, who was running a business finding plants and sod for local landscapers and having them shipped in at better prices than they could get at garden centers. He took Buck under his wing and told him what to do and how to do it.

In 1972, on a card table in their bedroom and with Mary Jane being his assistant between meals, errands and laundry, Arthur A. “Buck Jones and Associates was born.

Mary Jane laughed telling me that Buck used to joke around and say he could literally roll out of bed and be at the office, but he really could. He had the shortest commute in the Metro Atlanta area!

Buck went to an auction in South Carolina and picked up a pretty cheap delivery truck. He would locate the plants and sod for his customers, drive to the nursery, pick up the items and then deliver to his customers. He did it all. And loved every minute of it.

After a year of doing it all alone, just the two of them, they hired their first employee. Ten acres was purchased in Grayson and a trailer was put on it as the office. They began stocking items for the landscape customers, but still offered locating services and delivery.