Against the grain

In April, I visited several growers in New Jersey. It was a great trip with welcoming people and fascinating facilities. I believe I was sitting in a golf cart outside the Pleasant Run Nursery pumphouse with Carl Hesselein when I commented that every one of the nurseries I visited was different from the others in some way. He nodded and said, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

Despite being a fairly grotesque visual (who skins cats, anyway?), this is a very apt saying for the nursery industry. I’ve been visiting nurseries for about 13 years now and while there certainly are some similarities in how these businesses are run, there are lots of differences too. Everyone is producing plants. Yes, there are some best practices all the top growers use. There are also ways some growers proudly go against the grain.

Carl’s on the cover this month. Learn what makes him and his nursery a maverick in the industry. I was very impressed by the commitment to sustainability at Pleasant Run. Those solar panels you see on the cover save the nursery an average of $10,000 a year. However, Pleasant Run also reduces energy consumption in less obvious ways. Fifteen employees commute to work via carpooling. Instead of 15 cars traveling each day, there are four. That reduces the total miles driven by 67,000 per year.

Of course, Pleasant Run uses a ton of plastic each year, like many nurseries. With containers, flats and greenhouse poly, all that plastic adds up. In 2024, Pleasant Run recycled 32,380 pounds of plastic. Between that and the office supplies and other materials delivered to the recycling center, that’s 40 tons per year of materials not sent to landfills.

The nursery has 13 beehives and six vegetable gardens on property. Vegetables and honey are shared with the entire staff. Also, the chickens that are part of the farm provide eggs, which are shared with the owners and staff — a nice bonus in this era of fluctuating egg prices. Watch for more articles from that trip later in the year.

Michael Dirr makes the case for Cyrilla racemiflora as an under-the-radar flowering shrub.

We’ll be heading to Cultivate again from July 12-15. Come see us at booth 1637. As usual, we’ve prepared a primer of the best nursery-related sessions from AmericanHort’s multi-track education program. Also, our Get to Know Q&A column this month introduces you to Matt Guthrie and Tim Fleischer whose Cultivate talk, “Survivor Perennials,” focuses on plants that can outlast a brutal drought.