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I have worked for two garden center/design/build companies that were very successful. One was in a small western city and the other was in suburban Boston.
In both cases, they were not near a vast amount of growing nurseries (as would be the case in Oregon). It helped them buy in great volumes of plants and drove the cost of buying plants way down.
The garden center sales covered the cost and provided the personell to maintain all of those plants.
The volume of customers coming in and requesting landscape work was huge in the Boston one. It allowed for a high "consultation fee" to go out and look at jobs and then try to sell design services and follow up with install proposals after that. I was responding to about twenty inquiries a day resulting in about 4 consultations a day, then selling design to some of those, and selling installs to almost all of the people who went through the design process. The garden center was a marketing bonanza.
The garden center out west was smaller, but the benefit of bringing in bareroot stack in march and potting it up and maintaining it through the season added both to the profit on landscape plants due to cost savings, we never waited for plants or ran into availability issues, plants were loaded right out of the garden center right at the time they were needed.
The whole thing falls apart if you can't cover the costs of the garden center on what it directly produces on its own and/or you don't have the personell to manage it right and service the customers well. It won't be as easy as "build it and they will come".
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