Summary
MAINE EVERGREEN NURSERY, INC. has been one of the premier wholesale nursery businesses in Bergen County, northern New Jersey since 1963. From that time on, Carmen and Edna Costa, founders, were responsible for beautifying much of the New York/New Jersey metropolitan region.
Salvatore “Sam” Costa was the first member of the immediate Costa family to immigrate to America in 1901. Moving to Hackensack, where a number of families from Santa Croce, Sicily had already settled, 17-year-old Sam began working two jobs. Within a few years he had earned enough money to buy a horse and wagon and begin selling produce. Soon Rose Belluardo, whom Sam had had intentions to marry, arrived from Sicily. They wed and eventually raised four children, the eldest being Carmen, born in 1913.
By the 1930s, Sam was well on his way to becoming one of the richest men in the first ward in Hackensack. Although the hours were long and demands great, his grocery business was very successful and he invested in real estate, as well. Son Carmen followed in his father’s footsteps and took over Sam’s grocery accounts after he retired in 1946. Two years later Carmen bought and opened a store on Main Street in downtown Hackensack. By 1960, however, Hackensack had changed. Carmen could no longer rely on his ethnic Italian base and many families had moved to the suburbs and were no longer shopping in the town center.
During the Christmas seasons, Carmen had sold trees and greens at his grocery mart and had always had an interest in horticulture, being an avid reader of the American Nurseryman magazine. So in 1961, Carmen switched from the grocery to the wholesale nursery business, finally buying property in Maywood, two miles west of Hackensack in 1963. This was during the heyday of the suburban boom in Bergen County and the business took off. Some days 15- to 20,000 plants would be unloaded from tractor trailers in the nursery yard. The Costas bought from all over the nation and Canada and sold to construction contractors, landscapers, greenhouses, parks departments, and other “green” customers. The business continued to be passed down to family members: to Carmen’s son-in-law, Russ Trocano, Sr., and since 2007, to general manager, Russell P. Trocano, Esq., a practicing attorney in New Jersey and New York. Russell also serves on the board of the New Jersey Landscape Contractors’ Association.
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