Horticulture director keeps Wynn spruced up

Teresa Ellison earned degree at CCSN with night classes

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Wynn Las Vegas may be barely a year old but it took Mother Nature 100 years to grow some of the trees on its property.

Watching over them, and the thousands of other plants at the large resort, is the job of Teresa Ellison, 47, director of horticulture. She learned her craft with on-the job training in Maui.

"I fell into the job," she said. "I was working in a T-shirt shop when I caught a lucky break."

That lucky break landed her at the Hyatt Regency as an interior gardener. There, she discovered she loved working the soil and feeling dirt in her hands.

After settling in Las Vegas in 1988 with her husband and son, she landed a job at The Mirage as the interior horticulture manager. Eight years later, she was switched to the Bellagio as assistant director of horticulture.

Then, in 2002, she accepted her current position with Wynn Las Vegas.

Between working all day and raising a family, she found time to attend CCSN, one class at a time, until she earned her degree in ornamental horticulture.

Richard Reitz, professor at CCSN, said there are about 200 ornamental horticulture students currently enrolled in the program.

"They are not your traditional students," he said. "A lot of them already have degrees in other disciplines and bring with them knowledge gained from already having jobs in the field."

The real advantage to the horticulture program, he said, is that students tap into a network source.

Several students, for example, have gained employment through recommendations of their already work-ensconced peers.

Before the Wynn resort opened, more than 250 trees were taken from the Desert Inn golf course. Each one had to being carefully dug out, the root system kept in tact and stored in huge containers until the grounds were ready. Then a crane lifted them into place.

"We knew it would really stress them but we only lost a few," Ellison said.

As for how many trees and plants are on the property, the number is in the thousands. The resort's "mountain" has 2,500 trees on it.

Workers use two elevators to gain access to most of them. Some areas are impossible to reach even that way.

"We have our own rock climbing wall, just like you see kids using," Ellison said. "We all had to learn how to do it because the guys have to rappel down to get to those areas."

The hotel's Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare has three 8-foot olive jars tucked into the niche of a spiral stairway. They are topped by plants.

She and her crew had to dangle precariously over the ornamental railing to fill the jars with packing popcorn, place about 3 feet of soil in them and add the plants.

The exterior of the hotel has approximately 7,500 trees all together, and most are pines. They are an estimated 50 years old and tower close to 60 feet tall.

Trees are an integral part of the resort's interior as well, gracing the atrium. While not as tall as the pines, they still required construction machines to place them.

"They were so big that we planted them before the roof went on the atrium," Ellison said. "They had to be craned in."

Some of the 100-year-old trees are the alobansai, located off the VIP entrance. The root system begins well above the ground line.

Four 100-year-old pomegranate trees grace Wynn's Wing Lei restaurant and flank the Botero sculpture in its garden.

Wynn Las Vegas uses an all-drip system to thwart water waste.

It also has artificial turf and no real grass. The globes of blossoms hanging in the atrium's Ficus Nitida trees are actually silk flowers. There are 107 of them.

"We tried having them all fresh, but the watering system was a challenge," Ellison said. "They'd drip on the floor and (make puddles) on the walkways."

Ellison's job requires a lot of paperwork but when a large, new shipment comes in, she happily dons coveralls and gets busy, working alongside her staff.

Plants come from Ecuador, Holland and Hawaii. Every three weeks, the flowers in the atrium are changed out.

While the health of the plants is always a top concern, so is the aesthetics of grouping various plants with flowers.

"I think it (Ellison's job) takes a good eye and a sense of being aware of balance," said Denise Randazzlo, vice president of public relations. "She does a very good job of that."

The hotel devotes a lot of back-of-the-house space -- about 15,000 square feet -- to her department. Between the cavernous main work room -- which is roughly 40 by 80 feet -- there are side rooms, walk-in coolers, a holding area and offices.

The only thing missing is a greenhouse.

The combined staff for both indoor and outdoor plants numbers nearly 60 people.

They come to work at 5 a.m., a strategy meant to keep patron disruption to a minimum.

But it's not unusual for a team to drive up in a scissor cart and use stanchions to cordon off a work area.

The scissor carts allow staff to reach the top of the indoor trees.

"When we need to introduce insects -- lace wings, predition mites and ladybugs -- we have to go up high in the trees to release them," Ellison said.

Ellison may keep the Wynn looking top-notch, but her own backyard is lacking her touch.

"We have three dogs," she said. "They get into everything. Let's just say I really don't have a backyard."