About the Wild Plant Nursery
Our nursery is located in Franconia Park, in Springfield, Virginia, where it has operated since 2001, under an agreement with the Fairfax County Park Authority, which owns the Park. By commercial standards, our nursery’s physical structure is modest. Our growing area consists of about 2,000 square feet of raised beds, 21,000 square feet of shaded container space, and a very small (100-square-foot) greenhouse off-site for germinating hard-to-sprout species. All of our woody stock is grown in containers; our herbaceous stock is grown in both containers and raised beds.
Despite its modest proportions, our nursery is the most comprehensive source of locally-derived, native-plant material (“local ecotypes”) in the greater Washington region, and the only local facility dedicated exclusively to this type of propagation. (For more on local-ecotype propagation, see our Local Propagation Backgrounder.) For some of the species that we are working with, we are apparently this region’s only supplier—local-ecotype or otherwise. To review our inventory, download the Wild Plant Nursery Species List (a spreadsheet file).
Our nursery was built by volunteers, and volunteers still do most of the work—mulching, weeding, watering, filling pots with soil, maintaining nursery structures, and helping to collect, process, and sow seed. Our volunteers are an extremely diverse crowd. Some are young, some old; some have lived in this area most of their lives and some are immigrants. Some are seasoned naturalists; others joined us as beginners.
In the course of building the nursery, our volunteers have also built a community, with its own social rhythms, networks of friends, and unusual characters. This community-based nursery is a unique, grass-roots resource, for both conservation and for our own personal lives. We grow tens of thousands of plants at the nursery—but we also socialize, picnic, and some of us even sit together in meditation.
This nursery community has also created the ecological intelligence that guides our propagation effort. Thanks to our network of professional and amateur naturalists, and our own staff, we are able to read more and more of this region’s landscape. We know where to find the species of interest to us, we know when they produce seed, and, increasingly, we know how to propagate them in quantity. Our nursery is a genetic library: we offer conservationists direct access to the genetics of a broad and expanding spectrum of the local native flora.
Our nursery is also a kind of conservation utility—a resource for maintaining our region’s natural infrastructure. The nursery serves our own restoration programs, as well as our partnerships with area governments, schools, businesses, other nonprofits, scouting groups, and individual restorationists.
For more and more of our local native-plant populations, as well as the animal wildlife that depends on them, our nursery and its network of partners are a vital safeguard against the disruptive effects of development.
In 2006, our nursery received the Fairfax County, Virginia, Urban Forestry Award for Tree Conservation, for helping to preserve the genetic integrity of local, wild native-tree populations. In 2007, our nursery was recognized by St. John’s Community Services, which presented us with a Community Partner Award for creating volunteer opportunities for people living with disabilities. (St. John’s volunteers help out regularly at our nursery.) And in 2009, we received the Fairfax County Environmental Excellence Award for Organizations, in part because of the contributions that our nursery is making to local natural areas.
Where to Find More Information
In addition to the resources cited above, take a look at the slide shows listed in the links panel of the Wild Plant Nursery page. To get a sense for what’s currently going on at the nursery, look at the Wild Plant Nursery News, and check under the updates tab on the Wild Plant Nursery page. For more on the history of the nursery, read the Nursery Archive page.