Phillip Smith is a shareholder of the Native Plant Nursery and was general manager of the Taupo business between 1995 and 2014.

A major grower and supplier of New Zealand's native plants has gone into receivership, putting 35 jobs at risk if a buyer is not found.

The Native Plant Nursery, which has centres in south Auckland, Taupo and Christchurch, was put into receivership on April 30.

BDO receiver Andrew Bethell said it took over management of the company after its directors requested the bank to appoint receivers.

A secured creditor, such as a bank, can appoint a receiver to collect and sell company assets over which they have a financial claim.

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The Native Plant Nursery had 35 staff, all of which were still employed, he said.

"We're trading the business as normal and we're looking to sell the business as a going concern," Bethell said.

Just this week the company blogged about how it was preparing to deliver 1.5 million plants over the next five months.

The company started in 1961 as an off-shoot of the Government agency Department of Lands and Surveys, which was superseded by the Department of Conservation (DOC) in the 1980s.

The company was sold to private investors in the 1990s and now had 24 investors spread across Auckland, Taupo and Wellington.

In 2012 it was reported that the nursery was the biggest producer of native plants and seedlings in the country, with more than 2.5 million plants grown each year.

The nursery supplied 200,000 native plants for Auckland's Spaghetti Junction and more than 250,000 plants for the Transmission Gully highway project in Wellington.

JASON OXENHAM/STUFF The nursery provided more than 250,000 plants for Auckland's spaghetti junction.

Its 20 hectare Taupo site was previously owned by DOC.

In 2005 The Native Plant Nursery opened a second nursery in South Auckland and in 2012 a nursery near Lake Brunner, Greymouth, was purchased.



The Native Plant Nursery's Taupo site features "one of the largest private native seed cool-storage facilities in New Zealand" with the ability to store more than 100 million seeds in a controlled environment, its website said.

Nursery manager Matt Jackman said he would not provide comment.

New Zealand Plant Producers Incorporated (NZPPI) chief executive Matt Dolan said native tree nurseries were important for the primary sector. Demand was high for native plants due to an increase in farmers, councils and government embarking on biodiversity projects.

The Government had set a goal to plant one billion trees over 10 years and the loss of a native nursery could impact that programme, Dolan said.

NZPPI expected about 20 per cent of those trees to be native, he said.

Nurseries were not high profit businesses due to small margins and high volumes, and it was not a very easy industry to enter into, he said.

"It takes a lot of skill and plant knowledge."

But it could be an extremely rewarding sector which had bright prospects.

"It's an industry that's worth investing in. It's got growth ahead of it but it's not for the faint hearted."

The loss of a company of The Native Plant Nursery's size would be noticed in the sector in the short term but other nurseries would eventually pick up the spare volume, he said.

Nurseries were valuable businesses for regions especially when it came to providing plants for biodiversity projects, he said.

"Strategically in any region they're really important."