Growing Pains: Hopes and Heartaches at Native Plant Nurseries

We rely on native plant nurseries. We recognize that the nursery industry’s health is critical to the health of our restoration projects. What’s going on behind that greenhouse door?

This is a hard and unforgiving business. The growers are dedicated to habitat restoration but they still need a viable business plan. Horticulture and gardening are huge industries, but the native plant clientele is still relatively small. Tastes and attitudes towards garden design are changing slowly, and the naturalistic look isn’t a big seller yet. Commercial projects usually want the clean look, often allées of single species within a neat, modernist look for corporate parks or public boulevards. Nature is messy and it isn’t for everyone. Understanding and appreciation of ecological services and the value of biodiversity are not yet common knowledge, and ignorance is not bliss to a native plant nursery trying to make a buck.

Attitudes are changing. One grower told us that people come in and say they want to help monarch butterflies. They want to buy a milkweed, a single milkweed. Then they call back and ask why hasn’t a monarch appeared? One customer said, what are these big green worms on my milkweed? So, a quiet explanation of metamorphosis was started. We should not be surprised that most people have not studied lepidopteran developmental biology, should we? We can both honor the enthusiasm of the buyer and be mortified by the naïveté. But this is the crowd upon which a native plant nursery relies.

Wetland plants for mitigation were a big driver of these businesses, but this need too is fading in many regions as legal protection for wetlands increases. Less damage is being done and there is less need for native plant mitigation and replacement. Sales fall. Occasional big government projects for upland sites still appear, but this is episodic. This is a boom or bust demand and it is very difficult to plan for nursery staffing and growing space when demand is so variable.

We live in a time when Home Depot or Amazon.com can supply our purchasing needs within a day or two. What can a native plant nursery owner do when a developer or designer calls and asks for 300 sassafras or shagbark hickory trees to be delivered in two weeks? Although suppliers of traditional horticultural stock (azaleas, privets, red oaks, forsythia) can assume a steady yearly demand, the native plant market is full of surprise orders. All growers we spoke with dream of orders that come a few years in advance for woody stock or at least several months in advance for herbaceous plants. Then seeds can be germinated and woody stock obtained and grown out to satisfy that guaranteed order for the year after next. Alas, this rarely happens as design specifications and budgets typically are prepared a few months before requested delivery, not those fantasized few years. Contract growing gives the native plant nursery cash flow security and a healthy bottom line but it is not the normal style of a harried restoration process.

All native plant nurseries keep a catalog, the stock of plants in their greenhouse and yard which are steady sellers. The unusual plant species that is only occasionally ordered is tolerated on the grounds of dedicated growers but all too often these get donated, gratis, at the end of the growing season to the nonprofits when nobody pays up for the oddball plant. It may have ecological beauty, but it is a wallflower to a visually oriented customer.

Many buyers and some local regulations insist that the plants supplied for a restoration project be of local provenance. This is based on the interest in high survivorship in local conditions and the fear that genetic stock from afar will crossbreed with local populations and yield weak, maladaptive progeny. The concern and concept are real but the biological understanding of genetic pollution is still vague. In coastal restoration, for example, sandy soils and salty winds do create coastal ecotypes that have evolved to tolerate the stresses. Plants found right at the coast often are quite different in...