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PRESTON – In the heart of the Green Garden County lies a hidden gem.
Occupying 300 acres on Gallagher Road just outside Preston is the state of Maryland’s only tree nursery. The Department of Natural Resources John S. Ayton State Tree Nursery has been growing and selling millions of seedlings since 1996.
At the helm of the operation for those 30 years is state forester and general manager Richard Garrett, 64, of Hurlock. He’s been with the state forest service for 42 years and crossed the Bay Bridge when the nursery, squeezed by suburban sprawl and bisected by a new highway, was moved from Anne Arundel County.
Garrett described the operation to the Caroline Review Friday, March 6, 2026, during the nursery’s busiest season from February through April, when seedlings are harvested, sold and shipped. The exceptionally cold weather and snow delayed the harvest until March 3, about a month later than usual. “Normally, once we start digging, it takes about five weeks to get everything processed,” he said. Between two-and-a-half to 3 million seedlings will be dug.
On this day, as sparrows chattered in the rafters of one of two huge barns, employees were grading black cherry and persimmon bare-root seedlings by size and packaging them in large bulk bags for short term cold storage and shipment. Later, they headed outside to dig redbud with specialized equipment built in Switzerland.
“We sell trees in quantities from 25 up to 1000s at a time” to customers in Maryland and Delaware, Garrett said. They include everyone “from the individual that buys 25 trees to plant in the yard to somebody who wants to do wildlife habitat and plants a variety of species to benefit wildlife.” Bigger projects the nursery supplies tree for are “reforestation or other conservation purposes, ag programs (like) retired farmland or low quality farmland, strip mine reclamation.”
The two most popular pine varieties are loblolly and white. “We used to grow 5 million loblolly a year, and now we grow a half million because reforestation has dropped off that much. The commercial timber harvest that gets replanted has dropped off on the Shore. Logging mills are closed for the same reason. There's just not the demand for timber here. The demand for pulpwood and poles and pilings is still there, but in general, soft timber demand has gone down.” Among hardwoods, black cherry and sycamore are popular, as are the eight or nine different species of oaks.
Still popular are Wye Oak seedlings. State foresters started grafting the historic tree in Wye Mills before its demise in 2002, and a small plot of grafted Wye Oaks produce acorns intermittently.
“We are strictly a bare root tree nursery. We grow everything outside in the dirt, basically like a farm. We do not have a greenhouse,” Garrett said. Storing the seedlings properly calls for two large, 40 by 80 square feet, 21-foot tall coolers set at about 36 degrees. Because the trees are dug while dormant, “they need to think it’s still winter. We need to keep them dormant until they leave,” he said.
A state tree nursery isn’t “a hugely profitable endeavor,” he said. Other nurseries may produce seedlings, but mainly container or balled and burlapped trees, “and we're not doing that. I mean, when we first got approval in the legislature to move this nursery, that's one of the concerns: that we not compete with the private sector. And if you look at the private sector in Maryland, there's nobody doing what we do now.”
According to the DNR, “Operations at the State Forest Tree Nursery originated in 1914 (in College Park), where trees were first grown for roadside planting, The nursery later expanded to grow seedlings for conservation purposes including wildlife habitat, watershed and soil protection and forest products. The nursery moved to Anne Arundel County in 1949 and to its current site near Preston in 1996. The Maryland Forest and Park services were founded in 1906.”
Of the nursery’s 300 acres, 117 are leased to a local farmer. Increasingly, more ground is being devoted to orchards and seed production acres “simply because the seeds become harder to find,” Garrett said. “We started trying to produce stuff that we need, because 30 years ago, when we first came over here you could buy everything you needed. You could either collect it or buy it, and it was cheap. I used to be able to pick up the phone and order dogwood seed and get it here within a week, for $7 or $8 a pound. That same seed, and I probably couldn't get it, is $90 a pound.
“I love the job,” Garrett said in his soft southern accent. “I’m a farmer at heart.” A native of Port Royal, in Caroline County, Virginia, he grew up on a grain farm still operated by his family. “I tell everybody, if I wasn't the third son, I wouldn't have been here.”
He said he learned more about the tree nursery business from his time on the farm than from his forestry courses at Virginia Tech.”It’s still farming — just on a different scale” he said. He also learned that, like farming, “This is a job you have to live. You don’t do this job — you have to live this job.”
Garrett was hired in 1984 by John Ayton himself, who retired in 1996, a year after the Buckingham Nursery was relocated to Caroline County and named for the late forester.
The nursery, a DNR-owned state enterprise, is self-sustaining. It raises trees from collected acorns, seeds and walnuts from about 50 species of trees. With an annual budget of about $750,000, it “operates off receipts,” Garrett said. “We don't turn a profit. Anything excess goes into the Forest or Park Reserve Fund.”
His staff includes six full-time employees and a dozen temporary contract crew members during the spring harvest season. Two employees are funded through the “5 Million Trees” program.
According to DNR’s website, “The 5 Million Trees Initiative was mandated by legislation, the Tree Solutions Now Act of 2021. Part of this legislation included a historic directive to plant 5 million native trees on public and private land by 2031. These trees are in addition to standard state planting levels — so with more than six million people living in Maryland, at least one tree will be planted for each resident by 2031.” Those standard state planting levels are 500,000 trees a year.
Volunteers are organized to collect native seeds and acorns for the nursery “because seed is one of our biggest liabilities of being able to keep doing stuff, because finding seed in sufficient quantities is tough,” Garrett said. While seed is “commercially available, the demand is so high that there's never enough to go around, because every nursery out there is trying to get more seed and increase production.”
“We have the capacity to do more, but we're limited by how many acorns we get, how much dogwood seed we get,” he said. “Every species out there is in limited supply. So when you’ve got 50 nurseries competing over what's produced every year, it's not enough to go around.”
“The biggest challenge we have is finding enough seed to be able to produce trees,” Garrett said. “So during good years, some things you can store and keep for bad years. Dogwood seed, redbud seed is storable for two or three years, but acorns do not store. So if I need to grow 100,000 white oak every year, I need to have enough acorns available every year to grow 100,000 white oak. If they're not available here, we need to find them somewhere else.”
A bad crop is usually regional, not localized.
“That’s what happens when you have wild seed,” he said. “The same seed lot might do really well one year and horrible the next year.”
This is Garrett’s last year at the nursery. He plans to retire and enjoy more time with his wife, three children, six grandchildren and his “biggest vice,” duck hunting.
For more information about the nursery and ordering trees, visit dnr.maryland.gov/forests/Pages/nursery.aspx. For information about volunteering with the % Million Trees initiative, visit dnr.maryland.gov/forests/Pages/5-million-trees.aspx
