By Evan Cardin

FOR THE TIMES

From the east, the roads that lead to Pinelands Nursery on Island Road stretch for miles through the rich farm country just north of the Pine Barrens. The route carries travelers across sweeping fields and rolling hills, slowly winding back into one of the last large tracts of farmland left in the state.

Along the way can be found small tokens of a simpler time. On Monmouth Road in Columbus near the nursery grounds, hand-painted signs tout homemade pies and firewood bundles for sale. Farther down lie fading scrap yards and ancient flea markets with earnest offerings.

In the midst of this rural region, Pinelands Nursery is working to breed the most resilient native plants in all of New Jersey.

Since its humble beginning in 1983, Pinelands has grown to be one of the largest native-plant nurseries in the country, supplying millions of plants for environmental restorations throughout the mid-Atlantic, offering a full line of native plant species.

But while the market for native plants has exploded in recent years, Pinelands has maintained a tight-knit family operation with a strong customer service ethic. As sales manager Fran Chismar describes, the wholesale nursery is in a unique position to provide superior customer assistance to the landscape contractors and government entities it does business with.

“We’re quite large for a native plant nursery,” Chismar said, “but we’re small as far as nurseries in general go. This allows us to be very flexible and act as a resource for our customers.” Pinelands farms 25 acres in Mansfield Township and 15 in upstate New York.

Chismar, a 25-year veteran of the plant industry, has been managing Pinelands Nursery’s accounts for more than seven years. His responsibilities include drafting quotes and handling all day-to-day contact with customers.

“We really try to be a reliable source of native plant information for our customers,” Chismar said. “A lot of times customers are just throwing ideas at us and asking for professional advice. We try to give them the best service we possibly can.”

That customer-first mentality has been a Pinelands staple long before the nursery was ever profitable. When owner and president Don Knezick decided to incorporate Pinelands with his wife, Suzanne, in the early 1980s, it began as a small fruit plant operation with little capital. During the week, Don tended the nursery while Suzanne commuted to her job at a Manhattan telecommunications firm. On the weekend, the two worked side by side to sustain the Pinelands project.

“In the beginning it was all done by hand in Don’s parents’ backyard,” Suzanne said. “We’d hand-mix the growing soil, and it would just be he and I and a few high school-aged friends that would stop by. It was very labor-intensive.”

At first, Don and Suzanne sold their blueberries and fruit plants at Ag Field Day, a large agricultural fair held at Rutgers University. They did reasonably well with fruit sales, but the real ticket came when a landscaper discovered their booth. He told them he needed native plants for a restoration project, and ended up buying every single blueberry plant they had.

Don, who was working full-time as an adjunct professor in the Rutgers horticulture department, began getting a heavy volume of calls from landscapers. As it turned out, developers all over the Pine Barrens were in need of native plants.

“While I was up at Rutgers,” said Don, “we would constantly get calls in horticulture from people who were planting in the Pine Barrens. I started to realize there was a serious demand for native plants to fulfill the Pinelands regulations.”

Those regulations, laid out in the Pinelands Protection Act of 1979, require any entity wishing to develop in the Pine Barrens to repopulate the areas they disrupt with indigenous trees and shrubs.

“People were in need of indigenous vegetation,” Don said. “It made me think, ‘Well, I’m already growing blueberry plants, why don’t I grow a few other things?’ So we started growing pitch pines and about 20 or 30 other species native to the Pinelands.”

By the time Don earned his master’s degree in horticulture from Rutgers in 1984, he was well-versed in New Jersey’s native flora. There was still much he needed to learn though, especially when it came to herbaceous plants.

“I knew my native woody plants, my trees and shrubs, pretty well,” Don said, “but I didn’t know my herbaceous ones. I would take my field guide and go out to the Pine Barrens to botanize and try to figure out what was what, and I ended up getting pretty good at it.”

As Don’s knowledge base grew, so, too, did his conviction in keeping New Jersey’s flora native. Indigenous plants require far less input, allowing growers to scale back on pesticides and fertilizers. They also benefit entire ecosystems, providing environmental services that non-native plants cannot.

“If you plant native plants that evolved here with the native fauna, insects, birds and critters, they provide for a whole food web,” Don said. “Whereas, if you bring in an alien plant from say, Asia, it won’t provide anywhere near the number of benefits for the local ecosystem.”

Don also observed the importance of genetic diversity within groups of plants. A group with a wide variety of genes has a much better chance of standing up to droughts and disease than a group with similar genetic makeups.

“Some nurseries that sell native plants just sell clones,” Don said, “meaning that every plant is genetically identical. They’re after ‘This one’s prettier and this one’s bigger and this one’s bluer,’ but we don’t do that here. I feel that if you’re going to plant native plants, they should provide the genetic diversity to keep an environment stable.”

Not long after the Pinelands Nursery expanded its selection of native plants, the Water Quality Act of 1987 greatly grew its markets. It dictated that anyone who disrupts wetlands of the United States must mitigate the loss by creating more wetland territory, and it also required landowners to institute stream-bank erosion controls to reduce sediment pollution in streams and rivers.

All of a sudden, the range of demand for native plants stretched from the Pine Barrens to many states surrounding New Jersey. Pinelands Nursery didn’t miss a beat, extending its product line to include indigenous wetland plants and erosion control products such as coir logs, or long tubes of coconut fiber used to hold stream banks in place.

For Suzanne Knezick, who was handling most of Pinelands’ finances at the time, each expansion brought with it a new set of risks and anxieties. The thought of losing what she and her husband had built became a very real concern.

“Every time we would make a big financial stretch it would be kind of like walking off a cliff,” said Suzanne, who for the past 10 years has served as the vice president of Pinelands Nursery. “But reinvesting in our business has been the biggest key to our growth.”

The other key, Suzanne said, is finding good employees and hanging on to them. In the past few years, as Pinelands Nursery has branched out into seed mix blending and selling plants to other nurseries, its staff of dedicated workers has remained largely the same.

“We have a very nice work environment here,” Don said. “Our people want to be here. We have employees who have been here for years and years, some who started in high school and turned it into a career, and I’m really proud of that.”

At Pinelands Nursery, employees are free to learn and to make mistakes in the process. When sales manager Fran Chismar was first brought on, he faced a steep learning curve in adapting to native plant production. Steady support from the Pinelands family was needed to bring him up to speed.

“I’m very fortunate to work somewhere that people have knowledge and are willing to share it,” Chismar said. “Now that I’m on the native side of the industry, I would never go back to the ornamental side. There’s definitely a satisfaction that what we do here serves a function and a purpose, and they would have to drag me out of here kicking and screaming.”

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