Photography by Margaret Licarione

The quest for a perfectly manicured, spot-free lawn can border on an obsession for some homeowners.

They water their lawns, fertilize them, mow them and insecticide them, over and over again. They spend their precious weekend afternoons beautifying their lawns, and in some neighborhoods, groups of residents get together to judge the neighborhood’s best lawn.

This practice of lawn care is not just ingrained in the American psyche. It is also practical. A lush, well-landscaped lawn can increase a home’s value by 5 to 11 percent, according to a University of Michigan study.

Austinite Jerry Naiser understands this obsession with lawn care; that is why he built a company around it. Real Green Pest and Lawn Care has served Austin’s lawns for 25 years. Naiser and his employees provide an array of services, including home pest control, deep root fertilization, lawn care programs, fire ant control and irrigation system repair.

Naiser is a Texas Certified Master Gardener, an ISA Certified Arborist and a Texas Forestry Certified Oak Wilt Specialist. He holds every license the Texas Department of Agriculture has to offer. He wears many hats at Real Green, but his favorite is serving as a tree detective and diagnosing problems.

“Diagnosing insect and disease problems is the most fascinating [part of health care],” he said. “And seeing a plant that has fully recovered from a problem is the most rewarding.”

That is why he looks for the unwanted plants when he shops for plants for his home. He looks for plants with spots or missing leaves, or for those that look like they are on death’s doorstep. He takes them home and nurses them back to health.

Naiser is often around town giving seminars about what types of trees to plant, how to plant a tree properly and how to winterize lawn care. He also plants his booth at local festivals to answer and diagnose plant problems.

If you told him your lawn had expanding, irregular patches of dead grass surrounded by a halo of yellowing, dying grass, he would, of course, know you had a chinch bug problem. If you told him you had large, circular, irregular areas of brown grass with orange outer edges, he would know you had a fungal problem called brown patch. And if you took him a sample of grass that had brown spots with purple to brown edges and parts of its blade turning yellow, he would say you obviously had a problem with gray leaf spot.

Naiser is a Texan’s Texan. He wears boots to work, barbecues ribs and brisket in the barbecue pit installed at the office, hangs paintings of cowboys on his living room walls and waves a University of Texas flag outside his office. He is proud to be a fourth-generation Texan, and even prouder that his daughters are official Daughters of the Republic of Texas.

“My roots are here in Texas,” he said. “I am not going anywhere.”

Naiser’s great-grandparents immigrated to the United States from the Czech Republic in the 19th century. They settled in Fayette County, Texas, between Houston and Austin to grow food and send it back to their homeland during the European food shortage.

Naiser grew up in Houston, but spent most weekends and summers playing around his grandparents’ corn and cotton fields. His love for growing plants sprouted at an early age.

He lived in Houston until the age of 24, when, tired of the weekend commutes to Lake Travis for camping trips, he decided to move to Austin.

A few years later, at 29 years old, Naiser began Real Green. Since its inception, the company has thrived. Even despite the recent recession, his company has grown 25 percent a year during the past few years.

Over the past quarter-of-a-century, Naiser has seen a lot of bugs, spotting grass and faltering trees. While some problems have stayed the same since he started his company (people still have problems with fungus in the fall and insects in the summer, for example), some problems have changed.

“Back in ‘89, we didn’t hear about water shortage or anything like that,” he said. “It rained more consistently.”

Now, with Austin declared in a drought more often than not, and with cities regulating how much water residents can use, the lawn care business has gotten tougher.

One example of that is chinch bug, a drought-related critter that can quickly destroy a lawn.

“Chinch bug is a really common problem across the southern United States,” he said. “We didn’t see much of them until recently, but now we are seeing more and more.”

The bugs like to live underneath moist lawns. Once the lawns dry out, the bugs migrate up to the grass blades looking for moisture. When they pull the moisture out of the blade, they leave behind a toxin that kills the blade of grass.

These super-destructive bugs can take a lawn out in a week. If lawn owners let the problems fester, their lawns will turn brown like hay.

As the weather and environment continue to change, one thing will stay the same. Naiser will be out in the yard discovering new ways to keep lawns green and pest-free.

Real Green Pest and Lawn Care is located at 1212 Chisholm Trail in Round Rock, Texas. For more information, call 512-454-7336, or visit www.realgreenlawns.com.