Under the shadow of Mount Timpanogos, High Mountain Nursery flashes by off the scenic U.S. 189, a glimpse of unassuming greenhouses and baby trees in neat rows behind a house.
The space isn’t designed for casual shopping. There’s no sign at the entrance, and the gravel driveway in screams “no trespassing.” That’s because the main clients are state and federal governments purchasing native plants for large-scale restoration projects, said the nursery’s manager, Ian Peisner.
The nursery has been in business for about 25 years, he said, and is its sixth year at this location outside of Heber City.
“We’re growing essentially all native plants, and they’re plants that are mostly — probably like 95% — grown from locally sourced seed or cuttings,” Peisner said, gesturing to rows of young sagebrush filling most of the greenhouses.
These plants are what’s left of 170,000 sagebrush plants grown for a restoration project along the Bear River in Idaho with the Shoshone tribe, he said, which they will ship out and for planting before the ground freezes.
The project is re-engineering the river back into a more natural state — meandering, with a floodplain.
“A lot of the rivers around here, especially ones that have been around development for agriculture, have been channelized and essentially turned into canals, which is great if you’re trying to get water to your fields, but it’s terrible for the ecosystem and for basically anything that’s not human,” he said.
Plants grown at the nursery have been used in similar riparian restoration projects along rivers and streams. The nursery has supplied plants for restoration projects along the Jordan River in the Salt Lake Valley, trailhead plans with Snyderville Basin Special Recreation District as well as for the state and federal governments’ recent Provo River Delta Restoration Project, which feeds into Utah Lake and was designed to aid in the recovery of the threatened June sucker fish.
“Some of our work ends up being post-wildfire,” Peisner said. “A lot of it is also trying to rehabilitate parcels of land that have been very poorly managed or essentially unmanaged for many generations, whether it’s from grazing or industrial overuse.”
The idea is to plant native species best adapted for a site, which will prevent invasive species from taking over, then leave them alone to take root and repopulate.
“Because these aren’t for the most part getting extra water in somebody’s yard, you want something that is evolved to live on this hillside right here,” Peisner said, gesturing to the Heber Valley as an example.
The restoration industry has found that having plants that are genetically best-adapted for a site is what guarantees the most success, Peisner said.
Some of these plants include willows and cottonwoods, wetland grasses, bulrush, gambel oaks and woods rose, often grown from cuttings and seed they collect themselves.
In addition to locally sourced seed and cuttings to ensure success, the restoration industry has also found that due to climate change, the best plant for an area now might not be what’s existed there for thousands of years.
“Most places are now hotter and drier than they were for the vast majority since glaciers were here. There’s definitely a push toward planting species that are more well adapted to heat and drought, and sometimes are from a lower elevation than your actual restoration site, or from further south than your actual restoration site,” Peisner said.
While there’s some resistance to this strategy — concerns about introducing foreign species — Peisner said it’s applied with an understanding of the natural progression of a landscape. Plants from adjacent ecosystems would eventually spread into a new, higher-elevation area if it meant better growing conditions, but the process would take hundreds or thousands of years, he said. Management teams are just giving those species a boost.
“A lot of that is research that is ongoing, and nobody really knows,” he said. “This is all in the last maybe 10 years that people are starting to really think about that a lot and figure out how to fix or, I guess, think ahead.”
This is Peisner’s second season as the High Mountain Nursery manager, and most of his experience was spent on the other end, planting and planning restoration projects around the state, working with the nonprofit Tree Utah. He has a master’s degree from the University of Utah in Environmental Humanities, studying the relationship between people and landscape and researching ways to make that a healthy relationship.
“It feels really nice to be here and be helping out to rehabilitate places where, I mean, this is what I do with my time when I’m not at work is be out on the landscape, walking around, hiking around, skiing around. It only makes sense to try to help that stuff, help those places do better when I can,” Peisner said.
Reflecting on his own relationship with the landscape of Park City and Heber, Peisner said it’s been challenging to accept the change to the area since moving here in 2001.
“One thing that I think is very natural for people, at least in our culture, is that people see a place when they first arrive or first get used to it and they assume that’s how it’s always been and how it’s always supposed to be,” he said. “Park City now is very, very different, but that’s sort of the normal progression. Things change all the time.”
When it comes to landscape management, from fuels mitigation and pile burning to planting on open spaces, Peisner said that it can be hard for people to understand the necessity of the work.
“People have a tendency to imagine that there’s nature and then there’s people, there’s wild places and then there’s places where people live, and that those two things are totally separate,” Peisner said. “In fact, they’re completely interrelated, and people have been managing the landscape here for as long as people have existed here.
“I think people really need to accept the fact that they have a really big role in managing ecosystems they live in. Whether it’s in town, in the city, in the mountains, those two things are not separate and cannot be separate. That’s part of having a healthy relationship,” he said. “Not to manage it just for people, but to manage it for everything.”
With his work at High Mountain Nursery, Peisner is able to partner with like-minded professionals dedicated to preserving the landscape, and fixing problems handed down by previous generations.
He guessed the nursery has around 100 native species, and the work always rotates seasonally. Once they’re done shipping out orders for the fall, they’ll prepare for the next greenhouse planting season in January. Come February, it will be time to collect cuttings for the next year from trees like cottonwoods and willows.
In order to have a good growth rate, Peisner said they’ll often mimic each plants’ growing or germinating conditions to trick them into growing. In a seasonal climate like in Park City, seeds are evolved to stay dormant when it’s wet and cold — winter months — then germinate when they thaw, a signal for spring. So to simulate that, Peisner’s team will moisten the seed and leave it in the refrigerator for a few months, depending on the species. Cuttings are another strategy.
“(Willows, cottonwoods and dogwoods) all evolved to live along rivers, get flooded out and ripped out of the ground in the springtime with floods and be able to replant themselves where they end up,” he said. “Essentially, you’re just taking advantage of that, taking that plant and fooling it into thinking it’s got ripped out and going somewhere else.”
While they’re always growing for large projects, High Mountain Nursery is open for retail and always happy to talk about the benefits of native landscaping and help someone shop for native plants.
Call ahead to confirm hours at 435-731-0107 or with questions.