Our Wild Plant Nursery is designed to provide a comprehensive and genetically appropriate plant supply for restoration work in the Washington, DC, region. We are now working with over 200 species of native trees, shrubs, vines, and herbaceous (nonwoody) plants, all grown from seed that we ourselves collect from local forests and meadows. The use of local, wild seed is a standard best practice in ecological restoration because that helps to maintain genetic diversity and local adaptation in the species planted.

To see a list of species currently in stock, view our Fall 2011 Plant Sale Species List. (For our complete inventory, including species not currently available for sale, review the Wild Plant Nursery Species List. This is a spreadsheet file.)

Our Wild Seed Campaign was a big success! We raised about $14,000 and increased our wild native seed accessions more than ten-fold. Get the details. (Posted on December 13.)

Our fall plant sale, on Sunday, October 2, went very well. The sale was intended to raise money for our restoration work in Fairfax County, Virginia, parkland, and it certainly did that. See the Wild Plant Nursery News for a note on the results.

For recent activities at the nursery, read the Wild Plant Nursery News.

To see a list of species currently in stock, view our Fall 2011 Plant Sale Species List. (For our complete inventory, including species not currently available for sale, review the Wild Plant Nursery Species List. This is a spreadsheet file.)

To see some of these plants, view a slide show of Selected Nursery Species.

To learn more about the nursery's rationale, read our Backgrounder About Local Propagation.

These four slide shows offer a history in pictures of the nursery's development:
the 2010 Wild Plant Nursery slide show,
the 2009 Wild Plant Nursery slide show,
the 2008 Wild Plant Nursery slide show, and
the 2005-07 Wild Plant Nursery slide show.

Learn more about volunteering with the Sangha!

If you are gardener looking for plants for your home landscape, we hope that you’ll patronize our nursery. All proceeds from sales to gardeners are used to support our restoration work in Fairfax County parks, so your purchase from our nursery buys two things at once: a more interesting home garden and a little more Nature for our natural areas.

To see a list of species currently in stock, view our Fall 2011 Plant Sale Species List. (For our complete inventory, including species not currently available for sale, review the Wild Plant Nursery Species List. This is a spreadsheet file.)

The best time to buy plants for your garden is during our plant sales. We hold two such events every year, one in the spring and one in the fall. We post announcements on upcoming sales in the Updates section of this page. Feel free to contact Lisa, at info@earthsangha.org or (703) 764-4830, for more information. Lisa is also the person to talk to if you want to buy something but can’t make it to a sale. Tell us what you’re looking for and we’ll do our best!

A brief aside to gardeners who don’t already know us: our nursery is designed to grow plants for ecological restoration projects in the Washington, DC, region. It is not a commercial, retail operation. There are many excellent retail nurseries in our region, and several of them specialize in native plants. Of course, we hope that you’ll patronize our nursery, to help keep our restoration projects funded. But please note that commercial nursery stock may yield more uniform results than ours, and commercial inventories are designed to meet retail demands. A useful list of native-plant nurseries is available on the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s Chesapeake Bay Field Office “Bayscapes” web page.

If you are a conservation worker or a public-lands manager in the greater Washington area, our nursery is at your service. With over 200 species in production, all of them from wild-collected local-ecotype stock, we are in a unique position to help you with your ecological restoration projects.

To see a list of species currently in stock, view our Fall 2011 Plant Sale Species List. (For our complete inventory, including species not currently available for sale, review the Wild Plant Nursery Species List. This is a spreadsheet file.)

We also collaborate on longer term projects: tell us what species you’re going to need and we may be able to propagate them for you even if they are not in our current inventory. Please contact Lisa, at info@earthsangha.org or (703) 764-4830.

The Earth Sangha is a fully bonded contractor to Fairfax County for the provision of local-ecotype native plants. Fairfax County is Virginia's largest jurisdiction in economic terms, and has a rigorous contract development process. Other agencies in the region often find it cheaper, faster, and easier to work with Fairfax County contracts than to start from scratch with their own contracting. Your office may welcome this option too.

Our Fairfax County contract is available online for your inspection. There is no permanent, stable link to it, but here's how to reach it click-by-click: first, go to the Fairfax County Contract Register. (This link will open in a separate window so you won't lose your place here.) Then use the advanced search options to bring up our record: enter "Earth Sangha" into the Contractor Name field, or cut and paste our contract number— XX1117807621A —into the Contract Number field.

When our record comes up, click on "Notice of Award" under "Contract Number" to get (what else?) the notice of the contract award. Note that the Fairfax County Park Authority is designated as the sole "Authorized User." That doesn't exclude other county agencies or county contractors from using the contract (we checked), but the prices in the contract are intended specifically for the authorized user, and may not apply generally. Please check with us about pricing.

Click on "Accept. Agree." to get a pdf of the full contract.