ISSUE 24, HISTORIC NURSERIES, Part 1: America's First Native Plant Nursery
On the First Native Plant Nursery in the United States
Let me begin by reminding folks of the bad old days when high end garden designers only employed exotic ‘world’ plant materials in their creations. The 1980s and 1990s were hard times for Native pollinators in the ritzy neighborhoods and public plantings. Bumble bees had to forage the untended margins and old neighborhoods. In the last 20 years designers received enlightenment—there must be Native plants in the mix—and every nursery worth the name has an ample selection of Natives for sale. But when did nurserymen first find value in the trees, shrubs, grasses and wildflowers of North America, making them available to the public?
The first Native plants nursery opened by the Kelsey Brothers in Highlands North Carolina in 1884 and then moved to Linville North Carolina in 1889 by Harlan P. Kelsey who would oversee the horticultural business for the next 37 Years. Born in 1873 in Pomona KS, Harland came from a plant family. His father, Samuel Truman Kelsey, called “Captain,” was a professor of horticulture who itinerated from Kansas to New York to North Carolina, where he found a paradise of plants along the Blue Ridge Mountains and founded the town of Highlands. An ambitious young plantsman, Harlan Kelsey supplied the Vanderbilts without mountain pines for their North Carolina projects. He supplied Rhododendrons to nurserymen and landscape designers throughout the eastern United States. His ambitious got the better of him, and his Highlands nursery was seized for debt in 1895, and its contents partially sold off before an influx of cash from northern backers enabled him to secure the property and proceeds debt free in 1897. He decided to run the business where the money was ample, moving his headquarters to Boston and later Salem. His partners in NC kept the plantings thriving, and his office in Massachusetts kept the income steady.
There is much more to Kelsey than I can relate here—he was a park and neighborhood designer who among other things designed the neighborhood in which I live in Columbia SC. He was one of the rationalizers of the southern ginseng trade in 1900 working against the pillage of the wild populations to meet an unlimited Chinese demand by organizing the first sustainable cultivation of the plant. He was a horticultural historian and his research enable the planting of historic Salem. He was an important force in the creation of the Everglades National Park and more importantly, the Great Smokey Mountains National Park. He died in 1958.
I’ve often wondered why Kelsey looked to Massachusetts during his time of financial travail. Recently I discovered that Edward Gillett of Southwick MA headed the second firm devoted to Native material in 1892. The first to sell the Native treasures of the West offered “Rocky Mountain Evergreens, Plants and Seeds” from Loveland Colorado. Claiming to have organized his business in 1880, my distant relative O. D. Shields, was trying to project a priority for “Colorado Nursery Co.’s” concentration on Native plants once that Kelsey and Gillett had made ‘Native’ a byword in plant circles in the early 1890s. The earliest surviving price list of the Colorado Nursery dates from 1894.