We grow beautiful and useful trees (and other plants) that cross-pollinate food sovereignty and ecological restoration, because we don’t have to choose between feeding humans and feeding earth. Our tree crops and plant allies give us food, fuel, fodder, medicine, mulch, air conditioning, carbon converting, soil building, water restoring, and beauty!

Food sovereignty comes from La Via Campesina, the global peasant movement organizing millions of farmers and fishers, landless and migrant workers, and Indigenous caretakers for radical agrarian reform and a world without hunger. The heart of agriculture beats with growers, processers, and eaters, and food sovereignty is the right of these people to healthy culturally-desired food, produced in their own territory through ecologically sound and sustainable methods that care for land, seeds, water, and workers. The cultivation and distribution of food should be determined and defined as close to the ground as possible, by those doing the work through direct democratic ownership of the means of sustenance. Food is first a source of nutrition, secondarily an item for trade, so production prioritizes community before commodity. Food sovereignty is not individualistic self-sufficiency, because it requires the collective power and scale of bioregional food webs, stitched together by community planning and cooperative economies with protected access to land. In 2007, La Via Campesina convened more than 500 representatives from 80 countries in Mali for a World Forum on Food Sovereignty, where they insisted that food sovereignty requires a just income for all and implies new social relations free of oppression and inequality. Food sovereignty also depends on diverse peasant agroecology, the legacy of long experience and accumulated evidence, to grow enough food while maintaining harmony with nature by sharing land with the rest of life.

Ecological restoration puts that harmony into practice by weaving conditions for biodiversity to flourish. Despite the term’s connotation, ecological restoration doesn’t mean time traveling to a static state, and it doesn’t mean excluding humans. Humans always terraform ecosystems for food and fiber, though some ways are more extreme than others. Plows and the colonial policies driving them through Native America turned complex cultural ecosystems, thriving mosaic habitats, and traditional ecological havens into the wilderness that environmentalists enshrine. Reciprocal practices of farming, foraging, forestry, fire, and fishing cast nets into abundant food webs that humans help spin in partnership with an assembly of species. In our context, ecological restoration should often mean reviving cultural cycles of disturbance and recovery. That could look like imitating relationships before the devastation of the last several hundred years of ecological imperialism, it could mean preserving healthy habitats and corridors now, or it could mean adapting ecosystems to possible futures. Earth repair and water protection include controlling erosion, supporting streams, removing aggressive non-native species, and replanting native species to encourage nutrient cycles, energy flows, pollination, and active succession. Restoration is generational work, and historical example tells us it can align conservation and cultivation. Restoration ecology worth of the name also depends on something like restorative justice.

We propagate bareroot plants from seed, cutting, division, and layering in healthy soil made from compost, woodchips, and biochar. Our nursery grows along the banks of Cub Run and Blacks Run, in the form of forest gardens, deep-mulched beds and air prune frames, and riparian buffers to nurture waterways and serve as orchards, woodlots, and seedstock. A nursery is a site of attentive care and feeding, rippling out in degrees of intimacy and intensity. Our polyculture practices hybridize gardening and gathering, foraging and farming locally adapted to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

We grow special cultivars from cuttings, but we also source and select native and newcomer ecotypes within our seed collection zone: plants adapted to local geography and calendar. We plant out progenies locally for long-term seed selection to form landraces. We’re interested in how these tended and untended seedlings and cuttings could assist agroecology and its branches like agroforestry. Our plants lend themselves to riparian restoration, alley-cropped orchards, silvopasture fodder banks, forest gardening, and reforestation.

In our nursery descriptions, we note the old origins of our plants (where they originally came into being), their provenance (where our specific individuals adapted and were harvested), and their hardiness zone (the range of tolerable temperatures). That last one refers to what the species can probably stand, not necessarily the individuals we propagate since their provenance is usually more aligned with the Shenandoah Valley. The relationship between origin, provenance, and hardiness zone matters for the timing of foliage, flowering, seed set, seed germination, and pest and disease resistance. Of course, every location has immense variations such as microclimates, but, broadly speaking, seedlings we grow can have a fairly wide range of tolerance and resilience.

We ship plants all across the continental United States, but we believe the better option would be bioregional nurseries with community-planned needs and goals. We’re working that way, but until then we ship plants to places where they might not be adapted, and we encourage our customers and supporters to keep this in mind.

We speak and farm in ways that honor our plants as fellow creatures with histories and gifts, respecting their lives and the human cultures that cared for them. Our nursery also grows us, teaching us to be the kind of people we want to be.

To the fall of tree crops, to the fall of empires!