by Fran Chismar
Sultan of Sales, Pinelands Nursery
My career at Pinelands Nursery started in the summer of 2007. I was unaware of the type of projects that Pinelands Nursery supplied when I started my journey. In my mind, I was hired to sell plants, and that was exactly what I was going to do. Little did I know, over the next seventeen years, I would be an instrumental part of supplying over 50 million native plants to projects consisting of restoration, reclamation, remediation, and reforestation. Many of you reading these words already know this to be the legacy of Pinelands Nursery. No doubt, I am aware of my accomplishments. When I mention these accomplishments to family and friends, they stare blankly at the mention of Pinelands Nursery. They have never heard the name and have no idea about the projects we supply. Now, when I mention the name Doug Tallamy, their eyes light up. The excitement is apparent as they start to tell me the number of lepidoptera that White Oak hosts.
Dr. Douglas Tallamy has had a long, storied career. For over thirty years, he has been a professor at the University of Delaware. During his tenure, he has given many lectures, authored countless research articles, and inspired hordes of students to pick up the torch and carry on his good work in Entomology and Wildlife Ecology. Many of you are also aware of these accomplishments. My friends and family, again, are clueless to these feats of academia. What they do know is a little book called Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens that Doug Tallamy wrote and published in 2007. You can now add New York Times Best Seller to Dr. Tallamy’s list of accolades. This book managed to bring the importance of native plants and the food web to an audience that his research had not been able to achieve. Out of a plethora of wonderful accomplishments, his most recognized is that act of crossing over and reaching a larger and broader audience.
I am positive that each of us can reflect through our professional careers and feel that we have made a difference in the name of ecology. Many of you can walk to an exact GPS location to visually witness a project you have completed. When you analyze the sum of our parts, have our contributions been enough? Have we continued to preach to the choir, or have we expanded the ecological circle to bring bright and shiny new faces to our cause through public outreach? This is a question I find I ask myself often.
I am now entering my 36th year in the nursery industry. There are many achievements I have collected throughout that time, but there is one specific accomplishment that comes to mind: The Native Plants, Healthy Planet podcast. I was approached with this idea by Tom Knezick, the President of Pinelands Nursery, during the winter of 2020. He had noticed we had a social media following that consisted mainly of homeowners. This is a demographic that does not fit into our “wholesale to the trade” business model. Tom wanted to figure out how to connect our wholesale customers —people working on restoration or nonprofit organizations doing wonderful work in the space of ecology and ecological restoration – with this new group of attentive homeowners. We invited these guests into our world of native plants, via the podcast, and they listened to us speak to our heroes in the world of native plants and restoration. In the process, we introduced our heroes to an audience that was not even aware that they needed these concepts in their lives. Tom and I quickly realized we were not aware of the depth of our guest’s work and knowledge.
At the time, we were clueless of the significance of our project, which has brought ecological awareness to a new set of ears by pulling back the curtains of our industry. Our episodes are often filled with talk of “patience,” “acceptance,” and “inclusion.” Our guests have made a difference in the lives of people outside of the circle of our industry. In turn, our listeners have joined organizations, volunteered their time, fought homeowner’s associations, petitioned their local governments, and planted native plants in their own gardens. There are more of us now to spread this important message. We have created allies.
As inspiration, we would like to share some of the lessons we have learned from our guests over four years and two hundred episodes of the podcast. These are not the big messages that read as headlines across many of our industry newsletters. The takeaways we share here are the little reminders that we all need to push the movement forward. They are the sparks that ignite the flame. If you find yourself feeling defeated, just remember these tidbits of advice below.
- “It’s not the presence of non-native plants that is the problem – it is the absence of native plants.” – Dr. Douglas Tallamy, Author of Bringing Nature Home & Nature’s Best Hope
- “If I was trying to destroy an ecosystem, and make the wildlife that was there disappear, I would totally change their habitat. I would get rid of everything they depend on.” – Kyle Lybarger, Native Habitat Project
- “My ancestors didn’t know what they were doing and I am not going to blame them. But the truth is, and it’s obvious, we have a responsibility to shift the conversation.” – Benjamin Vogt, Author of New Garden Ethic & Prairie Up
- “There’s no way to make the necessary changes that we are all going to have to make in order to keep this planet livable without confronting, engaging with, absorbing, and finding new solutions for the decisions that have been made in our past.” – Camille Dungy, Author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
- “The good thing is that life and the ecosystems that species form have the extraordinary capacity to regenerate, even in the most unlikely places.” – Dr. Enric Sala, Author of The Nature of Nature
- “The soil is alive. It’s a living dynamic ecosystem. Twenty-Five Percent of all biodiversity comes from the soil.” – Ray Archuleta, Kiss the Ground documentary
- “It’s hard to write about something like insects when many folks are scared by them. I laid out this world of what things would be like with no insects at all. It’s not somewhere we’d want to live and it’s not a place we’d be able to live.” – Oliver Milman, Author of The Insect Crisis
- “Do you want to be popular amongst your friends, or do you want to be popular with the birds?” – Tim Mack, Birdscaping Industries
- “There’s the ability to completely waste all of your time on invasive species without making any progress. Go to your areas that are relatively clean of invasives and keep them clean.” – Dr. Michael Van Clef, NJ Invasive Strike Team
- “If we had the power to adjust the world temperature with a giant thermostat, wouldn’t we do it?” – Griff Griffith, Jumpstart Nature Podcast
- “I certainly think that viewing [nature] as a relationship, and building those relationships, that’s been a huge and fulfilling part of my life. The more you put into it the more you get out of it.” – Perry Sasnett – Headwaters Podcast
- “If you’re not having fun out in the garden then why are you doing it?” – John MaGee, The Native Plant Podcast
Whether we are just starting our journey or have been on our paths for decades, there is something in this podcast for everyone. We must all do our part and it is our act of reciprocity for all that nature has done for us. There are willing participants that are ready to be inducted into our ranks. It just takes a little work finding them. What have we done to cultivate and nurture these relationships? Tom and I have started doing public talks. One of our colleagues, who has spent decades doing environmental work for a public utilities company, is most proud of the native habitat he created on his own property. This is something tangible he can discuss with any homeowner. I recently have had my property certified as a Certified Wildlife Habitat and proudly display my sign. This has served as a great conversation starter. There are venues where we can do talks, there are places we can volunteer, and there are things we can do on our own properties. It will take all of us, collectively, to make a difference. How would you like your legacy to read? More importantly, what have you done to widen the circle and bring native plants to a whole new audience? I know my answer.