Dream job

If you visit Raemelton Farm, a Maryland wholesale nursery, you’ll probably see Angela Burke biking between rows of B&B trees with Lefty, her Australian cattle dog, at her side. The nursery’s director of sales and marketing has been at Raemelton Farm for 13 years, and she says it’s a been a fun ride.

She originally went to college for a two-year architecture program at Pennsylvania College of Technology, with plans to transfer to Penn State University’s main branch to continue her degree. However, while hiking around the beautiful forests of Northern Pennsylvania, Burke found her first tree love: Acer pennsylvanicum. That tree, straight bark maple, kindled her excitement about plants, and she realized she didn’t want to sit inside all day. So she changed her major to landscape/nursery, which was the horticulture degree Penn College offered at the time.

Rich Weilminster and Carl Bower were her main professors there.

“They’re definitely the ones who got me started on my tree nerd path,” Burke says.

Most classes were at the Earth Science Center, about 10 miles from the main campus. It had greenhouses, an arboretum and woodlands, and an amazing specimen of Heptacodium miconioides, seven-son flower, which became Burke’s second tree love. She credits those two professors and trees with hooking her on horticulture.

After college, she was set on becoming a landscape designer. So she got a job in the landscape wing of an arboriculture company called Cumberland Valley Tree Service. Angela found her first mentor there in Don Staub, who took her under his wing, showing her design principles and the greatness of Dolly Parton. It was a small company, so she was able to be involved with every portion of the project and learned a broad range of jobs along the way. She installed plants, walls, patios and water features. In her eight years there, she managed many projects, deciding what plants should be in which spaces, meeting with customers, handling the installation, and developing a maintenance plan.

Next, Burke moved to Frederick County, Maryland, to work for another landscape design company. She was there for about two years, but she wasn’t having as much fun. She was stuck inside a lot, both at the office and in traffic gridlock of northern Virginia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

A new start

One day, looking for new jobs on her lunch break, she saw a posting for Raemelton Farm. She wasn’t initially even going to click on it, because she was looking for another design job, not a nursery. But when she saw that the plant list included both of her first tree loves, she decided she would at least check it out.

She arrived for her interview and Raemelton Farm’s owner Steve Black pulled up on a Gator with his labrador retriever. They drove around the farm together for about three hours and the rest was history.

“I left that interview like, ‘Oh, I totally got this job,’ and honestly I’ve never looked back,” Burke says. “I couldn’t even imagine going back to landscape design at this point.”

Burke works well with Black. They have been growing the business together for 13 years. They listen to each other’s ideas and don’t dismiss anything out of hand. She likes that he’s willing to take risks and think outside the box. For instance, when Black decided to start planting black walnut trees eight years ago, Burke was skeptical she’d be able to sell them. It was not seen as a popular nursery crop, but once it was available, her customers couldn’t get enough of it. Raemelton Farm sells out of black walnut every year.

The relationship works both ways. A few years ago, Burke told Black the nursery needed more fruit trees. They were growing about 20 cultivars of the basic apples, peaches, pears and cherries, but she pushed to expand to 75 and include nectarines, apricots and plums.

“I appreciate that he’s willing to take a risk, because these risks feel a little scary at first, and then you realize, ‘oh, everybody wants this, just nobody’s providing it.’”

Raemelton Farm finds success by focusing on underserved markets, like landscape-quality native plants that are only available through reforestation nurseries in small sizes. Black and Burke have made an effort not to focus on the top five or 10 trees that customers can get elsewhere.

“What we have found is there’s no benefit to us following what everybody else is doing,” she says.

Good times, bad times

Angela has experienced plenty of highs and lows during her time at Raemelton Farm. The toughest challenge was when the nursery experienced significant herbicide drift damage in 2017, when a neighboring farmer failed to follow proper spray protocol.

“I basically spent the whole summer just crying in the tree fields, looking at all the trees I was trying to sell and knowing the copious amounts of money we were losing,” she says.

Editor’s note: read the full story here: nurserymag.com/article/herbicide-drift/

Another struggle came in 2021, when the periodical cicadas devastated their crops, along with most of the East Coast. Burke had her crew prune the trees very hard to cut out the broken branches, and was honest with her customers about the damage. It was a tough call, because not everyone was willing to buy a severely-pruned tree, but it ended up working out in the long run. A few years later, customers were specifically looking for trees without cicada damage, and Raemelton Farms’ trees had fully recovered when other nurseries’ hadn’t.

She’s had some amazing experiences, as well, including a special project at Oak Spring Garden, the former private estate of famed horticulturist Rachel ‘Bunny’ Mellon. In 1963, Mellon planted a stunning arbor using Mary Potter crabapple. More than 60 years later, however, the arbor is losing trees to fire blight and old age. Mary Potter does not exist in the trade anymore, but Raemelton Farm was entrusted to regrow the trees that comprise the iconic arbor. Three years ago, Burke collected scion wood cuttings from the original arbor and budded them onto rootstock at the farm. This winter, now that their replacement trees are nearly ready, Burke visited to lock in measurements for branching and spacing. She was able to spend the night in the Buttercup Room in Mellon’s estate and experience sunrise in the garden — a morning she’ll never forget.

Angela and Lefty

Looking for inspiration

Burke certainly gets inspired by other women, and the first on her list is best-selling author and horticulturist Brie Arthur. Arthur is a friend of the farm, as well, even sending scion wood of Prunus mume, Japanese apricot, to help Burke diversify her propagation options.

Another woman who inspires Burke is Erin Benzakein, founder of Floret, a cut flower company. Although she spends her days growing trees, cut flowers has become a hobby for Burke.

Outside of the plant world, Burke is inspired by Sierra Ferrell, a folk musician and lover of flowers. Her songs help Burke get through the long days in the field.

“Music is a big part of my life, as well as plants, and she intertwines the two together for me,” she says.

Lately, Burke has been needling her local politicians on the county and city level about invasive tree removal subsidies for residential properties. She’s worked in arboriculture and she’s married to an arborist, so she understands that removing trees is costly. But the Callery pear and Tree of Heaven are problematic for multiple reasons.

“I’m very persistent, so it will happen,” she says. “We’ll just see how long it takes.”

A career in horticulture

Burke thinks more young women should consider horticulture as a career, although they may have to convince others in their life.

“When I told my mom that I was going to start working at a farm, she kind of got freaked out. She’s a nurse and all her sisters are nurses. She said to me, I will pay for you to go back to college if you just go to be a nurse. That’s a real career.”

When Burke meets someone who thinks the horticulture industry is not a serious career path, she points to the researchers she works with at the University of Maryland, Bartlett Tree Experts, Moss Robotics, and the entomologists and pathologists she speaks with every week.

“This is a real industry,” she says. “It isn’t just ‘Oh, I’m going to be out digging holes all day.’ there are so many different avenues that you can take that are horticulture-related that won’t scare your mom.”

She recently hired three new field crew workers, and a new sales and marketing assistant, Haisel Cruz, started last summer.

“If you don’t want to work inside all day, if you don’t want to get stuck with a soul-sucking desk job, the horticulture industry really is a pretty obvious choice,” she says.

Burke does have administrative and management work that keeps her at the computer for a few hours each day, but she is able to get outside with the plants and recharge her battery. She is happy where she is and doing what she’s doing.

“Honestly, a month before I saw the job posting, I told a friend of mine, ‘if I could just ride my bike all day and talk about trees, that would be my dream job,’” she says. “And that is literally what I’ve been doing for the last 13 years. I bike around the farm with my dog. I pick out trees for people. I take folks on nursery tours. And I teach people here how to prune. It’s super fulfilling and I just keep going back to that conversation I had with my friend about exactly what I wanted my life to be.”