IF there were a prize for the most attractive business site in Bermuda, then surely Aberfeldy Nurseries would be among the favourites to win it.

Commuters making their way to and from Hamilton along Harbour Road each day can can treat their eyes every day to a glance at the immaculately maintained garden centre near the junction with Pomander Road.

Rows of thousands of plants stretch hundreds of yards across the 2.9-acre site, an impressive sight capable of calming even the most stressed-out motorist.

The driving force behind this vision of neatness and colour is Bobby Baron, who started with Aberfeldy as a truck driver in 1977 - 25 years on he is president of the company.

"If I walk into an establishment and it looks great at the front then I want to see the back," said Mr. Baron. "Keeping everything looking good is very important to us. It's a fibre that should run right through the cloth.

"We water all our plants by hand, so you would think that that's how we spend most of our time. But when I studied how we spent our time here, I found that we spend a good 60 per cent of it tidying up, tightening up the spaces between the plants and making sure the garbage is dealt with. Keep it simple and keep it clean. That is our philosophy."

Mr. Baron used to rent out mopeds to tourists at the hotels, before he joined Aberfeldy two years after the garden centre had moved to the Pomander Road site.

He has accumulated a wealth of horticultural knowledge in his years with the company without having had a formal education and that's something he's very proud of.

"I'm a self-taught horticulturalist who graduated from the school of hard knocks," he said. "I left school at 14 and I've been working ever since. And it's been very rewarding."

As well as the Paget site, Aberfeldy also utilises a 2.5-acre site in Somerset, where the company's greenhouses and their 32,000 square feet of production benches are situated. The plants grown there are brought to Paget for retailing. Aberfeldy now employs 36 staff, 11 of them in the greenhouses. It is a burgeoning operation.

"No pun intended - we are still growing," said Mr. Baron. "In the last six or seven years, the sales of bedding plants have really sky-rocketed. Colour is king. But we also sell a lot of woody ornamentals and they are what this company was founded on."

IT is not only plants that are nurtured with loving care at Aberfeldy, it is also team spirit and workforce morale, things that Mr. Baron believed were generally not high enough on the agenda in Bermuda.

"We open six days a week, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., except Tuesdays when we open an hour later," said Mr. Baron. "We use that hour to sit down in the sales floor area with the staff and talk. We hear about everything from company policy to product knowledge to everyday difficulties that someone might be running into.

"We try to get everyone to understand that everything they do affects somebody else and it makes everybody aware they are working in a team environment.

"We work hard on team spirit. I know people will criticise me for saying this, but I think that sort of stuff is somewhat new to Bermuda. We try to get people to understand that we are people-focused. We believe in standards, we want to be the best we can be."

At a glance the Aberfeldy staff appear to be a helpful and happy bunch, something Mr. Baron put down to them loving what they do and being well organised. He bemoaned what he felt was a tendency to look down on horticulture as a potential career on the island.

"Unfortunately, in Bermuda horticulture is seen as a last resort of employment," said Mr. Baron. "It's not rocket science, but it is plant science. Because you are dealing with a live product, you can never turn your back on it and say, 'Right, now I'm off until Monday'.

"It takes a tremendous amount of dedication and it has to be a labour of love. People who work here don't usually stay beyond two or three years if they have a 'nine-to-five' mentality. If they have an interest in what they are doing, they usually stay ten years and more."

The busiest times of year for sales are spring and fall, but the workload at Aberfeldy Nurseries remains fairly constant year-round.

"Our business is outside, so it's obviously weather-related," said Mr. Baron. "If you get a mild January and February, things can get going early. Things can go mad in April, May and June, but it slows a bit in July and then August and September are our slowest months.

"But that is when we are busy getting ready for the fall. Then it's soon Christmas when everybody wants poinsettias and Christmas trees. We've been doing Christmas trees for seven years, bringing them in from Canada. We get them from a farmer who's won awards for good environmental practices."

MR. Baron has worked in all departments in his quarter of a century at Aberfeldy, but propagation - basically growing plants, sometimes from seeds, sometimes from cuttings - has given him the most satisfaction. Experimentation with imported plants and finding out whether they can survive and thrive in Bermuda's environment is another aspect of his job.

"It's getting hard to grow anything in Bermuda on a large scale," said Mr. Baron. "I think there are only in the low 400s acres of land left in commercial production of vegetable crops. When you look back, we were a farming community and I think people were probably happier and healthier in those days.

"But there are still a lot of fairly big gardens around the island. And Bermuda may not export onions any more, but people are still growing a lot of them. Strawberries have really taken off as well. Ten years ago we were selling about two to three thousand a year - now it's 22,000."