How Pleasant Run Nursery finds success on its own terms

Drive up to Pleasant Run Nursery in Allentown, New Jersey, and you’ll realize it’s a bit different. Maybe it’s the golf carts or solar panels. Maybe it’s the peacock strutting through the greenhouses. Carl Hesselein, fifth-generation nurseryman and Pleasant Run’s president, likes it that way. Being different makes it fun.

“Every time I hear somebody say ‘oh no, you can’t do it that way’ I’m like ‘There’s 10,000 nurseries in New Jersey, and they’re each doing it 10,000 different ways,’” he says. “Nothing about this is cookie cutter. Your production is what you want it to be and that’s it. We’ve all been to other nurseries, and none of them are the same. Different soil, different fertilizer, different liners, different inputs, different employees. Everything is different, but we’re all doing the same thing. It’s awesome.”

How it started

Pleasant Run Nursery was a fresh start on old Princeton land. Its founders, Richard and Heidi Hesselein, are both 4th generation nurserypeople. They met when Heidi was interning at a California nursery. Richard is from the Bay Area and Heidi’s parents owned Princeton Nurseries, which was one of the country’s largest wholesale nurseries. They got married and both started working at Princeton. Richard managed the Allentown farm and eventually became president.

He and Heidi founded Pleasant Run in 1998 after Richard left Princeton. Richard bought the farm from the Flemer family. Originally it was nine greenhouses and a shade structure composed of several old Chinese chestnuts left in the old Princeton fields. Richard grew hostas underneath them.

As a child, Carl definitely resented the nursery. He thought of it as the child that got all the attention. When he left for college, he never expected he’d come back. He went to California, studied marine biology and figured he was going to scuba dive for the rest of his life. After a few years and a few different majors, Carl was feeling the pressure.

“I said ‘I really need to either figure out what I’m doing or leave, because this is not cheap,’” he says.

In one of those moments where the answer you were looking for was right in front of you the whole time, Carl decided to finally give the horticulture world a try.

“My family’s been in the plant industry since, like, the 1800s,” he says. “Let’s see what this is all about. I took introduction to botany and absolutely fell in love.”

He changed his major, and once he received his botany degree, he moved back and started interning at nurseries up and down the East Coast. It was 2010, nurseries weren’t hiring, so Carl worked several jobs, first for a landscaper, next for a garden center with a large rewholesale division. On a trip with his dad to tour North Carolina nurseries, Rick Crowder at HawksRidge Farms offered Carl a job. He loved working for Rick and learned a lot at HawksRidge, but when he received an offer in 2014 to join the family business, he took it.

Richard always handled production at Pleasant Run and Heidi handled sales. That division worked successfully for many years.

“My mom’s always been good at selling, so that made sense,” Carl says. “And my dad, he’s just a grower. He wants to look at plants all day and not deal with humans.”

When Heidi decided to retire in 2019, Carl moved up to take her role. And in 2023, Richard retired and Carl became president, running the company and heading up sales and production. He enjoys both sides of the business.

“Sales is fun because you get to ham it up with people, but production is also a lot of fun because I get to decide what we’re going to grow, how much we’re going to grow and when we’re going to grow,” he says. “It’s a control thing. We’re lucky our clientele is very into us being creative with what we grow and how we grow it. So we get to have this blank canvas of having fun with plants.”

Hitting the target

Pleasant Run’s customer mix is predominantly landscape contractors with a little bit of retail garden centers and a laser focus on landscape architects. Almost all of the nursery’s marketing and advertising targets landscape architects because Carl wants them writing Pleasant Run into their jobs or recommending Pleasant Run to their contractors. He aggressively markets toward cities like New York and Boston, where a lot of their work goes.

To that end, the nursery sponsors and exhibits at all the landscape architecture shows it can on the East Coast and some national ones as well. Carl makes a point to speak at landscape architecture conferences.

“It’s an under-served industry,” Carl says. “And the architects are not always treated fairly. There’s a huge hole in communication between growers and architects, and we fill that hole very well.”

Pleasant Run Nursery grows a wide range of products, ranging from 1-quart perennials to 30-gallon trees. Alongside the bread-and-butter crops, Carl offers a breadth of material so that they can fill any job for its customers as a one-stop-shop – the nursery has about 1,800 SKUs. They don’t grow really big trees, and they don’t grow 10,000 of any one plant.

When Richard was running the place, it was even more of a plant collector’s nursery.

“The list was certainly a lot more esoteric under my father,” Carl says.

The margins of that business model weren’t great, and it was hard to be efficient. So Carl made an effort to change the nursery’s production plan. Based on the quotes he would see come in, he’d pick up the patterns of which plants landscape designers and contractors were looking for and in what quantities. Then, he could cross-check those lists to see what his customers want that his nursery wasn’t necessarily growing. The results may not excite the plant geeks at the nursery, but he knew the demand was there.

“We would turn up our nose at things, and I’d say ‘well, hold on. I’m seeing this on bid sheets all the time. We need to bring this in-house because otherwise we’re losing this work.’”

The biggest example of bending to the whims of the customer: liriope.

“I still cringe at the thought of growing liriope, but it’s our top-selling plant. Out of all the cool stuff we grow, Liriope ‘Big Blue’ is still our top-selling plant.”

The pragmatist in Carl understands why liriope is so popular with landscapers: it simply doesn’t die. And so he overcomes his distaste for that particular plant.

Carl’s goal is to modernize the business while still keeping true to the fun off-kilter bits that make Pleasant Run what it is.

Wildlife preserve

Pleasant Run currently has 25 acres in production with room for another 40. Carl says he’d like to save some of that space for cows, however. Developing a cow pasture may not seem like the typical way a nurseryman would use his land, but Carl has fond childhood memories of hanging out with the cows. Richard was a collector of rare animals as well as rare plants, which explains the peacock.

Carl has three children of his own now: five, three and less than a year old. And he’d like to recreate that experience for them. But there’s a business justification for the critter country, as well, and it has to do with creating a fun shopping excursion for a particular segment of Pleasant Run’s clientele.

“We have a plethora of animals on the farm,” he says. “It’s great advertising for landscape architects that generally have studios in the city. They come down here and it’s like Disney World. There’s dogs everywhere. There’s peacocks everywhere. We have donkeys.”

Pleasant Run allows customers to pull their own orders, so every individual container gets tagged on the potting line.

“We’re one of the more expensive nurseries, but if you want it, chances are we have it or something damn close,” Carl says.

It works because many of Pleasant Run’s customers are not shopping on price.

“When you’re in those high-end, high-visibility jobs in New York City, like Central Park, it’s not about what it costs, it’s about doing it right.”

Sustainability initiatives

Richard was named NJNLA Nurseryman of the Year in 2008, and Pleasant Run is a 2018 NJNLA Hall Of Fame inductee. In 2022, Carl was named NJNLA Young Professional of the Year and in 2023, Pleasant Run was awarded Grower of the Year by the Perennial Plant Association.

One of the accolades Carl’s most proud of is that Pleasant Run was the first wholesale nursery in New Jersey to be recognized as a New Jersey Sustainable Business. The program was developed by the N.J. Small Business Development Centers and the N.J. Department of Environmental Protection. Businesses need to commit to five categories to qualify. Pleasant Run qualified for the title in 12 different categories and works on adding more each year.

One of the most noticeable ways Pleasant Run focuses on sustainability is through the use of renewable energy. The entire nursery, office, pump house and even Richard and Heidi’s 18th century farmhouse on the property is powered by three rows of solar panels installed in 2012. Each row is 200 feet long and 15 feet wide.

“It was during the Obama administration when there was a huge incentive,” Carl says. “If you did over X amount of dollars in solar, you get a third of that back in cash, essentially. The ROI goes from 10 years to seven, which made it a no-brainer.”

Energy savings average $10,000 a year.

The electricity the panels provide also charge the batteries in the nursery’s fleet of 17 golf carts. Workers use the carts in place of tractors, Gators or even pickup trucks.

Carl likes the electric golf carts because they’re quiet, they have more pulling power than the gas golf carts, and if they break, you just get a new battery.

Changes and leadership

Over the years, Carl’s learned to make adjustments. Pleasant Run used to be a finished 2-gallon grower, providing big, landscape-ready plants.

“There’s certainly a market for that, but our market doesn’t want that,” Carl says.

He’d heard from his customers consistently that they needed it smaller – particularly for perennials.

For the big landscape architecture jobs, designers generally want to work with quarts, 1-gallon or plugs. Now, Pleasant Run isn’t going to switch to plug production, but the nursery is moving away from 2-gallon containers where possible and doing more 1-gallon and quarts. Reception has been good for the new quarts, which the nursery started doing in spring 2025.

Pleasant Run has reduced container size, increased production numbers and “finally got a potting machine and moved into the 20th century,” Carl deadpans.

Carl has developed a hands-off leadership style. Typically, he tells his team what he wants done and works with them to figure out the best way to do it.

“I’m very much into free will,” he says. “If somebody doesn’t want to do it, I don’t want them to do it because you’re not going to get the best out of them and chances are, they’re not going to do it right. It’s very important to me that people want to do something, because if I don’t want to do something, I’m not going to do it. Why should I expect someone else?”

It works for Pleasant Run’s tight-knit crew of about 25. Production manager Trevor Provost is Carl’s childhood best friend and perennials production manager Kenny Dilts is another close friend. All of the office staff and most of the production staff have longer Pleasant Run tenures than Carl. Many members of the production crew are former Princeton workers who joined Richard when that nursery folded.

The nursery doesn’t use seasonal labor; it keeps its employees year-round. There are plenty of tasks, from cleaning every plant on the farm in preparation for spring, to receiving liners in January. The only slow time is from Thanksgiving to Christmas.

One unique challenge: Because of the iron used to make ammunition and guns in the area for the Revolutionary War, many of the creeks in central New Jersey run orange. A Wisconsin-built machine removes the iron from the nursery's water before the pumphouse distributes it through the farm.

There are other, clean aquifers in New Jersey, but many are reserved for Allentown Township residents as potable water.

Succession success

For many family businesses, the transition between generations can be perilous.

However, the transition between Richard and Carl was surprisingly calm. Surprising because Carl thought his father was never going to retire.

“Everybody in the family was pretty certain we would have to have an intervention at some point to get him to give up control,” he says. “But one day he just came up to me and said, ‘You know, I’m sick and tired of being anxious and worrying about stuff. I don’t want to do that anymore.’”

Richard was a fourth-generation nurseryman, and he’d been growing plants pretty much from the time he could walk. Richard and Heidi set a different rule for Carl and his siblings: the children didn't work on the farm unless they volunteered.

“To this day, everybody that knows him is flabbergasted that he was able to let go,” Carl says, “and that was incredibly brave of him to do that.”

Carl thinks the timing and the circumstances played a part. If the nursery was struggling or times were rough, it may have been harder for Richard to step away.

“I think I was lucky enough to step into the position essentially during the pandemic,” he says. “And we all know how that worked out for the industry. Everything was looking awesome. And my dad was just like, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing. This is your problem now.’ And that was just it.”