SUMMERVILLE — In 1947 Amon Baucom started a landscaping business with little more than a wheelbarrow and a shovel. Sixty years later Baucom's Nursery, the great grandchild of Amon Baucom's landscaping enterprise, is still a family-oriented business, with multiple locations in North and South Carolina and Florida, and a consistent ranking as one of the top 100 greenhouse growers in the U.S.

Come September, however, the Baucom saga will be starting a new chapter. Baucom's has decided to close its 320-acre floriculture operations in Summerville, liquidate its assets and start a new business venture in the economically expanding Dorchester County area.

The story behind the sale is a familiar one to large scale nursery growers across the U.S. Land appreciation over the last decade has increased property values to the point that the land is often worth more than the businesses on it.

Greenhouse nurseries generally require a substantial amount of land to operate, and recent economic and residential growth have pushed the geographic boundaries of many towns so that nursery operations that were originally built out of town now find themselves sharing property lines with suburban housing tracts and commercial districts.

For many nurseries, the combination of valuable land and rising production costs leads to some tough, but necessary decisions. For Baucom's Summerville facility, that decision was to step away from the greenhouse nursery business and embrace the potential land development projects afforded by their prime location. Summerville is close enough to Charleston to be accessible to the major sea-port and bustling commercial district, but far enough away that it has maintained its small town appeal.

"Summerville worked as a nursery site for us for a decade," says Gary Baucom, CEO of Baucom's Nursery. "We've had a good run here, but the best use of this land is not in nursery stock. It just doesn't make sense anymore."

Still, Baucom admits that the decision to re-develop wasn't an easy one and reminisced about his family's "deep roots in the Summerville area." Among the items coming up for sale this September is the first bulldozer bought by Amon Baucom back when Baucom's did more landscaping than growing.

The first phase of the re-development is scheduled to take place, not at the Summerville location, but online. Baucom's has hired the online auction firm West Auctions to liquidate the Summerville nursery, as well as surplus equipment from its Florida and North Carolina operations.