he Evening of Enchantment at Donaroma's returns for its 21st year on Thursday, Dec. 11, which will also be its last. The family plans to retire the tradition after this year.
Atwood Company, a regional developer founded by private equity investor William Cumming, is putting together an application to build 64 apartments on three acres on Upper Main street, where Donaroma’s Nursery, Landscaping and Floral Design currently operates.
As development has spread on the Island, yard and garden services have exploded, employing a growing segment of Vineyard residents.
Donaroma’s Nursery will be allowed to keep their lot at the airport business park, reversing an airport commission decision last month to evict the company after a history of noncompliance with their lease.
Donaroma’s — the Edgartown landscape maintenance company, wholesaler and nursery — is setting roots in Oak Bluffs for the first time, with plans to open up a retail and wholesale operation on a large plot of cleared farmland off the Vineyard Haven-Edgartown Road.
From his earliest years, Michael Donaroma could not help but be aware of the bipolar, us and them, have and have not division of Martha's Vineyard society.
"My father left when I was two," the Edgartown businessman and selectman recalled this week, on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the nursery business which has carried him across to the have side of that social divide.