About Liberty Tree Nursery

The Nursery

Liberty Tree Nursery is located on our five acre property outside of Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada and run by me, Jesse, along with help and support from my wife Chelsey, our two daughters, a flock of turkeys, and sometimes our wolfhound, Jerry.

I've been growing anything I could get my hands on since I was very young. I remember getting a little tabletop greenhouse kit from the hardware store when I was about 8 and thinking it was just about the coolest thing ever. Not much has changed.  

A fascination with seeds came a bit later.  This is the part of this page where I admit that the nursery is largely an outlet for a seed collecting addiction.  Seeds hold such promise for the future and there are so many of them. A single mature red oak can produce over 10,000 acorns in a mast year. It's incredible!  There is a lot of satisfaction to be had from imagining the generations that will spring from the one whose seed you just had a direct hand in sowing. A piece of you lives forever when you plant trees.

A passion for the natural world led me into a formal education in forestry, but I always felt the pull towards the plant propagation space.  In the years while I was in school and after, I worked in large forest nurseries in New Brunswick and British Columbia where we grew tens of millions of conifer seedlings for reforestation every year. When my wife and I came back from out West, I knew I wanted to keep growing but this time with a focus on different species, largely those that have value for conservation efforts or provide some type of significant non-timber value to humans, wildlife, or broader ecosystems. 

The nursery started off quite small, and now it's gotten to the point where I'm growing well over 10,000 trees, shrubs, and other plants a year in an area with a relatively small footprint on our property. I'd really like to see what the limits are. How many trees can you grow and put out into the world in a lifetime?

A keen interest in plants - cultivated or wild - will keep you engaged for your entire life if you want it to. That's my plan anyway. Thank you for taking the time to visit the site.  I hope some of my enthusiasm rubs off on you and encourages you to get out there and grow something!

Jesse