Nursery owner learned wind hurts as much as sticks and stones

By Ethan Bratton
After Katrina Newswire

HATTIESBURG — Even though Hurricane Katrina ravaged Melissa McDaniel’s home in Hattiesburg, it was the destruction of her business and damage to her day-job office that made the difficult transition to a FEMA trailer even harder.

McDaniel owns Stix and Stones Nursery on Hwy 49 North and its sister landscaping company, Cut it Right, in Hattiesburg. Her business offers shrubs, flowers, trees, soil, fertilizers, garden stones, sod and just about everything else needed to start or maintain a garden of any size.

When Katrina rolled ashore on August 28, 2005, McDaniel’s year old business lost everything. Stix and Stones accumulated more than $10,000 in wind and water damage. But while almost everyone else in the country was dealing with too much water, McDaniel was dealing with the ravaging effects that too little water has on living things.

“Like most people in Hattiesburg, we were without water for a long time but it was incredibly devastating for the business,” McDaniel said. “Water is the main life source for most of my inventory and to have some after the storm would have saved many of the plants.”

While the wind did damage most of her inventory, McDaniel said that with water, a windblown plant can sometimes be revived.

Losing a full inventory is trying on anyone, working to get it back was one of the hardest things McDaniel has had to do over the last couple of months. She says her local insurance carrier was "horrible." After going through four different insurance adjusters, the company paid for much of the inventory but not as much as McDaniel felt like they should have.

“It was a cycle of submitting and resubmitting documents every time they changed my adjuster,” McDaniel said. “It’s disheartening and while they tried to help me, in the end they didn’t replace everything I needed them to.”

On top of dealing with the insurance company, she has run into some roadblocks on the way to reacquiring many of the plants: Wholesale vendors in the area lost their crops too. Three of McDaniel’s largest suppliers lost everything and have decided to retire from the wholesale nursery business. So, for the last few months she has been forced to make new top-quality contacts in the drastically dwindling field..

The business, while owned by McDaniel, is run by her daughter Nicole Blackburn. McDaniel had wanted to own a nursery for a long time and a year ago it looked like it could come to fruition. While she would have loved to run the business fulltime, she enjoyed her job as coordinator for information services at The University of Southern Mississippi Alumni Association and couldn’t take the risk of going without any income.

McDaniel needed someone she could trust to run the day-to-day business of the new nursery and Blackburn was the perfect candidate. With no prior experience, Blackburn dived in headfirst and says she enjoys it more than she thought she would. In fact with Blackburn’s help, McDaniel has been able to keep up-to-date on the rebuilding progress while still holding on to her job at the Association.

Interestingly enough, McDaniel couldn’t escape the outcome of Katrina wherever she went, even at work. The Alumni Association, located in the former University president’s residence, fell victim to Katrina’s wind when a tree crashed through the carport and northeast corner of its office.

On the business side, The Association had to put off a $3 million fundraising campaign to expand the office because they had to repair the damage and much of their fundraising base came from people deeply affected by the storm.

In a press release after the storm, Alumni Association President Danny Mitchell said he felt that the right thing to do was to focus on alumni in need and not on funding an office expansion.

“The catastrophic event that has taken place in the southern part of our state and Louisiana demands that our priorities now lie with our alumni, friends, supporters and others who have suffered such terrible losses,” Mitchell said.

Things are looking up for McDaniel five months after Katrina though. The Alumni Association has restarted their fundraising efforts, while Cut it Right has reopened and business is booming with residents in the Pine Belt area that are ready to repair their yards from storm damage. And Stix and Stones Nursery should reopen by the end on February, just in time for Southern Mississippi residents to replant their award-winning gardens.

McDaniel couldn't be happier.

“After everything that has happened in the last few months, it’s great to be able to have a foothold on everything,” McDaniel said. “Everything is looking up and it feels amazing.”

Ethan Bratton is a senior journalism major at the University of Southern Mississippi . The After Katrina Newswire is a project of the School of Mass Communication and Journalism at USM (www.usm.edu/afterkatrina). This story can be reprinted with this credit included.