TOURING JOHNSON WHOLESALE NURSERY

WHOLESALE NURSERY IN BUSINESS FOR 50 YEARS

MIKE YANNEY, HEAD PROPAGATOR, STANDING AMONG ROWS OF SEEDLING OAKS

ORIGINAL FARM HOUSE, NOW WHOLESALE OFFICE

ORIGINAL BARNS STILL IN USE

BEAUTIFULLY MAINTAINED FIELDS OF NURSERY STOCK...

...PROPERLY GROWN, PRUNED, DUG AND SHIPPED 

Sunday, 10:00 AM.  60 degrees F in Milwaukee.  The sky is clear and there is a light to moderate breeze. The humidity is 66%.  It will be a fine afternoon  for the baseball game between the Milwaukee Brewers and  the Cincinnati Reds.
   Having grown up in, or perhaps more properly,  around the nursery business, I have  a  great affinity for it.  And over the years I have done a lot of business, and continue to do so, with wholesale nurseries.
   Folks not directly involved with growing, buying and selling trees and other plants are unlikely to know much about the nursery business, which is really an industry with many different facets. Most people buy their trees, shrubs and other plants at garden centers or big box outlets.  Years ago there were small nurseries that grew trees and shrubs and sold them locally at retail, but they are few and far between nowadays.
   The wholesale nurseries now provide the vast majority of plants directly to retail outlets and landscapers  and do not themselves sell retail, and unless your are in the business one is not likely to ever tour or really get to know what the wholesale nursery does or how it operates.
   Johnson's Nursery, located in Jackson, Wisconsin, just north of Milwaukee is a large plant propagator  and grower, with three hundred acres in production.  They grow a lot of common trees and shrubs for the retail trade, but also find, propagate and grow choice native plants and hard to find ornamental plants.  They hybridize, or find natural hybrids and selections of native plants in order to  grow those that will be best to use for landscaping.  There is a vast difference in individual plants within a natural population, and of course some will grow better in cultivation than others, and it is the task of the professional plant propagator to find and produce these more suitable plants.
   Most lay persons think a tree or shrub is just planted as a seedling in nursery rows and grows there until it is dug and sold.  Actually the process is far more complicated than that, and depending on the species or variety of trees or other plants to be grown may involve multiple transplantations, root pruning, propagation by cuttings or grafting (of different kinds), treatment with growth hormones, and on and on.  As trees, in particular, mature in the nursery they must be continually pruned to produce healthy, beautiful, salable nursery stock.
   The nursery business business involves a great amount of capital investment in land, equipment and  facilities.  And, it is risky because tastes and markets are always in flux,  often resulting in lots of trees and shrubs that took years to grow being unprofitable because of unforeseeable changes in the market place.  It is not a business for the faint of heart.
   It is a business in which one must be well educated in business principles and in the biological sciences, but just as important is training in the trade itself, and these business are often passed on in the family.  The heart of the trade is often traceable to knowledge and tradition passed down from father to son, or master to apprentice, often from Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century European customs, like most any other highly skilled trades.  Cloning and genetic modification of species is mostly the stuff of science and science fiction, and has had little impact on the broader nursery trade..
   Our Urban Forestry Council group enjoyed an interesting and insightful day at Johnson Nursery, and it brought back many memories, some pleasant and some not so pleasant,  of my introduction to the "green industry,"more than sixty years ago. Perhaps the greatest change has come in the digging and handling of heavy trees, which used to involve laborious hand labor and is now done more easily and efficiently with heavy equipment.