By Tatiana Zarnowski Gazette Reporter Photographer: Bruce Squiers Working Wednesday in the greenhouse at Saratoga Gaming and Raceway, Sally Nizolek, landscape supervisor, and Gary Sharp, assistant gardener, transplant baby seedlings as they ready for another planting season.

SARATOGA SPRINGS — Right about now, Sally Nizolek is tending to her babies. She’s watering the tiny salvias and the half-inch-tall dusty miller seedlings. She’s keeping an eye on the gangly “mothers” - mature plants from which she takes cuttings - to see if they’ve recovered.

At Saratoga Gaming and Raceway, landscape supervisor Nizolek and assistant gardener Gary Sharp work year-round, raising from seeds or cuttings almost all of the plants that will grace the 160-acre grounds this summer.

She plans, grows and plants roadside beds, window boxes, big planters and the track infield, as well as trims shrubs and oversees tree prunings.

Four seasonal workers — often college students studying to be landscapers — help plant the 35,000 annuals and keep them looking good all summer.

The two greenhouses where all of the plants get their start are tucked away on the back side of the harness track.

“There are a lot of people that work here that do not know they’re here,” she said of the greenhouses. “We’re like Saratoga’s biggest secret garden.”

It’s somewhat unusual for an operation like Saratoga Gaming and Raceway to grow all of its own flowers rather than buying them from greenhouses.

Saratoga Race Course just started growing some flowers in-house.

Dehn’s Flowers of Saratoga Springs provides 50,000 flowers to the flat track as part of a contract. New York Racing Association employees grow 5,500 begonias at greenhouses near the Oklahoma Training Track and another 5,500 at Belmont Park.

“We started two years ago growing a percentage of the flowers in our existing structures,” said Charles Wheeler, facilities manager at Saratoga Race Course.

NYRA has saved money by doing so, he said.

But NYRA buys its begonias as “plugs,” or very small plants, while the racino/harness track only buys plugs when it can’t get certain plants in seeds, Nizolek said.

The harness track has raised all of its own plants for decades, both to save money and to give the gardener more control over what is planted on the grounds.

Nizolek designs more than 70 gardens at the harness track.

Unlike residential landscaping that focuses on detail, commercial landscaping has to capture people’s attention from afar.

“You have to kind of plant in large blocks of color,” Nizolek said.

She makes her gardens different each year to keep herself interested and to spark racino guests’ imaginations.

“My theory here is, if I can make my guests feel really good going into the racino, then they’re going to have more fun,” she said.

Even when they lose money, patrons get to walk out and see the flowers again.

“I even have guests say that to me,” she noted.

After 10 years as the head gardener and a career before that working in her own residential landscaping business, Nizolek is still entranced by the magic of new plants sprouting from seeds.

“I still delight in the fact that they come up,” she said.