George Bridge calls his 20-acre private nursery Acorn Farm. Wry, very wry. An acorn will give you a mighty oak after a century or so. Bridge will give you one right away. For a price.

Amid the fertile clay farmland of upper Montgomery County, Bridge has spent just five years at this site amassing astonishingly large and old specimens of trees and shrubs, hand-dug from a thousand unlikely places and assembled in a park like setting.

An arch of espaliered apple trees stretches for 150 feet; 10 25- foot-tall copper beeches glisten in the gray humid air; and an old, upright Japanese maple with a trunk a foot thick dates to the days when the Roosevelt in the White House was Theodore, not Franklin.

The visitor gropes for words. Pinch me, seems appropriate.

Bridge doesn't advertise; he holds his blue-blooded client list close to his chest. And if you have to ask the price of a delivered specimen, you probably can't afford it. Scanning a 20-foot spread of a century-old peegee hydrangea he declares: "I wouldn't sell this for a penny less than $25,000." Installed, of course, and covered by a one-year warranty -- not that he could replace it.

Most of these plants have been here less than three years and many are destined for old-money estates in the Hamptons and other ritzy enclaves around New York.

The drive to Acorn Farm in Laytonsville takes you past new mega- mansions in old farm fields around Olney. As much as they may need landscapes to temper their grandiose architecture, Bridge eschews such places, preferring to place his material in established estates whose owners know and value his stock.

Nurseries in general have been upsizing the trees they sell in recent years for homeowners wanting mature-looking landscapes, and some have developed a specialty in selling four-figure big trees to wealthy clients. But even they cannot match Bridge's stock for age or character. He salvages some shade trees but his interest is more with big shrubs, hedge material, fruit and ornamental trees and woody vines. He has retrieved them from homes, farms, even trailer parks where they have been growing for decades. Beyond their size, he says, such plants develop singular branch and bark patterns and exude a character that cannot be matched by uniform nursery plants.

"I know someone in France who does this, and a tree broker in south Florida, but not to the degree that George does," said Madison Cox, a New York-based landscape designer to the rich and famous.

Cox is among the handful of interior designers, architects and builders who have connected Bridge to discerning clients who may, for example, want a new driveway to look as if it had always been there with a frame of billowing, irregular hedges of century old English boxwood.

"He really doesn't bother with the hoi polloi down here," said Washington landscape designer Jane MacLeish, who has snared an espaliered apple tree from him for a client.

"I'm like an antique dealer, but it's plant material," Bridge said. And like an 18th-century writing desk, each of his plants comes with a story. There's the white, flowering Japanese wisteria tucked behind a row of other giants. The thick gyrating trunk rises about nine feet and then extends one hundred feet tip-to-tip. It was salvaged from a house in Potomac that was being demolished. Before digging the root ball, Bridge's crew had to jackhammer a pool terrace. Once gingerly excavated, the plant was threaded from the back of a long trailer to the cab of the truck towing it and then back to the trailer. How did the truck turn corners without snapping the vine? Carefully.

Most times, Bridge doesn't have a ready buyer for such a specimen and doesn't want one. He'd much rather have it sit at Acorn Farm for at least a year, allowing the plant to recover from the transplant shock and repair its roots so that its second move will be a piece of cake. Under Bridge's watchful eye, it recovers from any wilting and yellowing and receives shaping and clipping from Jon Clark, a lion tamer of a gardener who makes even the biggest trees bend to his will.

The key to moving ancient trees, said Bridge, is the human hand. Eight-foot-wide hydraulic scoops called tree spades have been developed to lift and shift old plants, but only hand-digging will give you an optimum-size root ball with roots severed cleanly and not crushed, said Bridge.

Once set in a new hole surrounded by compost, the plant will develop a mass of fresh feeder roots. Transplants are watered by hand and sprayed against pests and disease as needed, but not unduly stimulated with fertilizer. The compost seems to nourish the plant and encourage fresh root growth.

When the time comes to redig the tree, the new, fibrous roots are incorporated into a larger burlapped root ball. Bridge, 44, has been doing this for years and said he loses few plants when the job is done right.

Originally from Vancouver, he worked in the nursery trade in California to make ends meet while he and his wife were educated. He went on to law school and his wife, Paula McDowell, became a professor of English literature. She now teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Along the way Bridge met a guy named Joe Arnez who specialized in scavenging and selling old plants. "He took me under his wing and showed me how to move this stuff. We would run up and down the West Coast digging big rhododendrons, deodar cedars, crape myrtles and bring them back to the Bay area." His record sale was $75,000 for a colossal cutleaf Japanese maple.

You won't find price tags on his nursery plants. Ask and he'll tell you that trained fruit trees will sell for somewhere between $4,000 and $8,000, or that an imposing weeping Japanese maple, which Clark shapes while crawling beneath it on his back, would cost $30,000, and so forth.

Bridge has mixed things up in the nursery (Web site www.oldplants.com) for picturesque effect, so a visitor is likely to stumble across stunning specimens of Japanese maples -- upright, weeping, cutleaf, green and purple, at various points, including a grassy walk next to a pond with gushing fountain.

Customers typically arrive by private airplane to local airstrips and come and take a gander at the merchandise. Bridge described them as "very wealthy people who want it done right." Clark says they often linger to picnic by the pond. "They have the best time and seldom do you hear them talking about prices."

But mention the costs and Bridge says the profits are hard won, and he lists a litany of problems facing his unusual line of work, from the trials of trying to dig and move big plants at a moment's notice to getting your hands on a diminishing supply. When he started in Maryland, he could find many languishing giants in old mom-and-pop nurseries. Other landscape companies did too, and the old stock was soon taken to furnish the lavish gardens of the newly rich in the dot-com boom.

The paradox now is that while these trees may end up in the swankiest gardens in America and on the pages of Architectural Digest, they come from some of the humblest venues: trailer parks, inner-city neighborhoods, poor rural hamlets, places where decades ago people planted trees and shrubs that have outlived generations of owners and grown majestic as their surroundings have decayed.

Bridge has his network of finders, including builders who will tell him when a property is going to be demolished and old plants are up for grabs. About 40 percent of the finds are from such sites. But the remainder come from prospecting. He reckons he drives close to 100,000 miles annually along the back roads of Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania and surrounding states ever watchful for a big shrub or tree. Perhaps it is like being a fly fisherman: your heart races at the glimpse of a plump rainbow trout. Then you have to snare it.

He is an attractive figure, trim, tanned, low-key and personable, but still he must call on strangers asking them if he can dig a 10- foot hole in their garden and remove the magnolia their grandmother planted. "It doesn't make sense to them, they can't understand why I would want to buy their tree."

He makes an offer based on the value of the plant and the costs of moving it, and if it is accepted he returns with the crew and equipment needed to lift it -- or them. Often he will remove a whole hedge of big shrubs.

But the initial knock on the door is always unpredictable. Bridge counts three occasions when the owner greeted him with a gun. "But on those occasions I ended up buying the plant material from them too." He says he has been in neighborhoods that are simply scary.

Clark chimes in: "George can deal with everyone from the fanciest person to the poorest person."

One of his best finds was the stock of espaliered apples from the research fields of West Virginia University in Kearneysville. Researchers had grafted and trained all kinds of espaliers, including some that had green and red varieties grafted on the same tree, another set of espaliers had three varieties in tiers, the uppermost about nine feet high so you could walk beneath it.

He remembers spying these in the farm fields and asking if he could buy them.

"Oh no, we're a university" came the reply. He continued to drive past them to see them in flower, in fruit, in winter outline. One day in spring "I got a call: 'We don't have any money to care for them anymore and they are going to be bulldozed.' "

Quickly, he amassed a crew of 25 to dig and transport the trees. A builder friend from Canada came down to Acorn Farm to install posts and wires to support them. Although they were moved at the worst time, after breaking winter dormancy, the trees all survived. With some other trained apple trees from a private orchardist they represent a collection of more than 500, of old varieties such as Granny Smith, Red Delicious and Stayman.

"I could tell you some names of people" who have yearned for these fruit trees, he said, but then doesn't. There was the one famous doyenne who wanted them all or nothing -- Bridge sensed out of greed, not appreciation for their beauty.

Sorry, he said. No sale.