Maurice Marshall once was called “the man with the shapeliest limbs in town.”
They weren’t talking about legs. Marshall owned Marshall Nurseries in Denver for 30 years and was known for trees and shrubs he sold, as well as landscaping.
Ann Capron, his stepdaughter, said the “shapely” limbs comment was made at a nurserymen’s event years ago.
Marshall was always interested in pleasing his clients, said his daughter, Sydney Winstrom of Omaha. “Dad would go back to the customer, sometimes a year later, to see if everything was OK with the landscaping.”
Marshall was 102 when he died Aug. 30 in a Blair, Neb., nursing home.
The nursery business seemed to be in Maurice Marshall’s bones.
The care facility where he died was near the house where he was born: on the Marshall Nurseries land in Nebraska. His father, George Marshall, and other family members owned the nursery with branches in Arlington and Omaha.
Marshall was a quiet, honest man and a perfectionist, said Max Capron of Arvada, who was Marshall’s landscape architect for more than 20 years and father-in-law of Ann. “He laid down the law. If somebody did something wrong, he’d get demoted,” said Capron.
Ann Capron likes to brag that she was “the first water girl” at Marshall Nurseries in Denver.
“There were seven of us college students. We took hoses and watered rows and rows and rows of shrubs and roses,” she said.
Roses were the only flower that really interested Marshall. Still, he became well-known for “inventing” the seedless ash tree, Capron said.
Marshall was born in Arlington, Neb., on Nov. 13, 1904, and was a salesman in his father’s nurseries in Omaha and Arlington. In the early days they raised apples and shipped them all over the country, Winstrom said.
Marshall earned a business-administration degree at Grinnell College in Iowa and a graduate degree in horticulture at Iowa State University.
He opened a nursery in Denver in 1941, first on West Colfax Avenue and later on Harlan Street. The family no longer operates the nurseries.
Marshall had been president of the American Nurserymen’s Association and the American Rose Society and was landscape architect for the Society of American Florists in 1953 at the American Flower Show.
He was a member of the Masonic Order for 81 years.
Marshall’s first wife, Lida Larson Marshall, to whom he was married for 35 years, died in 1963. His second wife, Dorris Hartwell Ellis Marshall, to whom he was married for 34 years, also died.
In addition to his daughter Sydney and stepdaughter, he is survived by another stepdaughter, Sue McCauley, of Detroit; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at vculver@denverpost.com or 303-954-1223.
