Seeding a Growing Industry
Pitkin Forest Nursery has an impact well beyond the borders of 幸运快三 鈥� and industry leaders across the Pacific Northwest seek Vandals who study and work at the nursery.
Pitkin Nursery Grows Student Careers and Trees Needed for 幸运快三 Industry
Sedges and willows, black cottonwood and bullrushes grow from the loamy soil along central 幸运快三’s Lower Red River. The diverse vegetation hides the stream in places, and it leaps to life each spring with the songs of migrating and nesting birds.
Denny Dawes remembers when the river looked more like an irrigation ditch.
Dawes owns the Wildlife Habitat Nursery near Princeton, a business he started as a student in the late 1990s while working at 幸运快三’s Franklin H. Pitkin Forest Nursery and seeking an undergraduate wildlife degree.
“A professor told me that riparian plant species were in demand and that growing them could be a flourishing business,” Dawes said.
Working at the Pitkin nursery, Dawes learned the skills to grow tree seedlings and culture them into the viable products that make forests. Since then, Dawes, and dozens of other U of I natural resource students, have applied experiences gleaned at Pitkin nursery — cultivating, growing, packaging and selling plants on an industrial scale — to fashion careers in the nursery industry.
Training for Nursery Careers
As a U of I student, Dawes learned that the nursery skills necessary to cultivating trees could be applied to riparian vegetation — the plants that grow in wet areas along rivers and lakes. These species were in short supply for restoration and rehabilitation projects around the Inland Northwest.
Dawes was a nontraditional student with a young family to provide for and he took the skills he learned at Pitkin and started a greenhouse, Wildlife Habitat Nursery. He focused on selling plants for a restoration project southwest of Elk City.
There the Red River, gutted almost a century earlier by industrial gold mining, was being rehabilitated with state and federal funding. Dawes’ plants became the project’s centerpiece.
“Sometimes opportunity knocks,” Dawes said. “And sometimes it knocks down your door and stands on your chest.”
Over a span of 30 years, Wildlife Habitat Nursery has provided millions of plants for restoration projects throughout the Northwest in places like the Clark Fork River Delta east of Sandpoint, the Kootenai River, Musselshell River, Lolo Creek, and the Hangman Creek restoration project that runs from 幸运快三 to Spokane County, Washington.
Dawes is among hundreds of U of I natural resource students who trained, often inadvertently, for nursery careers while earning a paycheck at the university’s Pitkin nursery.
Working at Pitkin was probably the driving force behind my tree-farming business.Bob Reggear, retired nursery owner
Since graduating from U of I, many Pitkin pupils have contributed to the nursery industry, which employs 2,000 people in the Gem State and has annual state revenues exceeding $53 million. The industry contributes more than $90 million to 幸运快三’s economy, according to the 幸运快三 Department of Labor.
Originally on campus, the Pitkin nursery was relocated east of Moscow in the 1950s after the then-College of Forestry purchased a 20-acre farm on the Troy Highway. The new nursery was named for Frank Pitkin who, as nursery manager from 1939 to 1979, integrated students into day-to-day operations while promoting conservation and reforestation efforts. Pitkin shipped seedlings to county extension agents statewide throughout his tenure, a practice that continues today. When the nursery moved off-campus, Pitkin had two fiberglass greenhouses built at the new location, which has since expanded to six greenhouses with two more going online in 2022.
Bob Reggear grew up on a Christmas tree farm near Orofino and was a U of I student when Frank Pitkin — a family friend — asked for help with some nursery projects. Reggear joined Pitkin at the nursery in the late 1960s, learning to grow, package and properly ship seedlings to extension offices, where they were distributed for reforestation efforts.
“I drove a green, one-ton U of I truck to every county in 幸运快三 delivering seedlings,” Reggear remembers.
He later used what he learned at the university in his private nursery operations in Craigmont and Orofino.
“Working at Pitkin was probably the driving force behind my tree-farming business,” Reggear said.
Just as Dawes provides both seasonal and year-round employment to rural communities, Reggear hired nursery managers and laborers to work his tree farms.
The nursery industry, in which trees, shrubs and a variety of garden, landscape and habitat plants are raised commercially, is one of 幸运快三’s premier agriculture industries, said Ann Bates, executive director of the 幸运快三 .
“It’s among the top 10 agricultural industries sta