“I think you must know the best place to walk,” he said.
“Say, do I ever! Tomorrow? I got the afternoon off.” She had heard he was a rich man’s son.
• • •
It was not a fair day. Heavy mist hung over the mountains. Yet the afternoon went in a direction he had not dared hope for. They walked up a steep trail, there was a clumsy kiss as they veered into sweet fern, her shrill laugh, then grappling and rolling on the ground. The perfume of crushed sweet fern fixed the experience. A light rain began. When he looked beyond her, he saw an army of perfect young white pine trees glistening in the wet mist, bursting with the urgency of growth. The rain, falling slant and silver, amplified their resinous fragrance. It was raining, the girl, her hair in ratty wet tails, was pulling at him to go back to the hotel, but he was happy. And somehow he was caught, not by the girl, but by the little pines.
• • •
After the crash of ’29 the country staggered under the weight of economic depression and the rage of striking workers. Breitsprecher-Duke began to lose its footing. James Bardawulf told Conrad, now finished with school and with a degree that fitted him for nothing, that the family company would employ him if he wished, but without salary; after all he had money he could live on and Breitsprecher-Duke was enduring hard times. Raphael was counting on his smooth good looks for a job in films, and Claude worked for a real estate company specializing in western ranch properties. Since Roosevelt, cattle ranching had been popular with those who still had wealth.
“Let me think about it, Father,” Conrad said. He thought instead of Dieter’s old seedling nursery business. Could anything be done with it? It had been more of a hobby for Dieter with very few clients, but over the years he had kept on a single employee, Alfred McErlane, who managed the greenhouses. Perhaps it was time to evaluate the nursery, to talk with Mr. McErlane.
• • •
Conrad had been very young the first time he was in one of the greenhouses, a visit with his parents and brothers. He remembered a long, long wet concrete floor with hoses and watering cans in the aisle. There was a man in a yellow raincoat. Raphael and Claude had run down the aisle and were leaning over a tank at the end. Conrad followed them. When he looked into the dark water he saw huge slow-moving creatures, orange, spotted black and white like cows. James Bardawulf said they were koi, a kind of fish.
“Why are they so slow?” asked Raphael.
“Because they have seen everything in the tank, nothing new,” James Bardawulf answered, and he laughed. But Caroline was upset and demanded that the koi be caught and brought to the pond in the garden.
“At least they will have a better life,” she said. Two days later, though, Conrad saw a pair of great blue herons at the edge of the pond, and when he went closer to see if the fish were visibly enjoying their new freedom, the birds flew up, leaving behind the bones of the orange koi.
• • •
Very little had changed in the greenhouse. Al McErlane was not wearing a yellow raincoat, but hoses still stretched and coiled on the wet floor. As a child Conrad had not noticed the seedlings, but now he saw them: spruce and pine.
He looked first at the account books and client lists, for the nursery did a small but steady business.
“Al, it looks like our customers are mostly local parks and private landscape concerns. And just spruce and pine seedlings? I see very few lumber company clients. Tell me how you think our position stands and if you think it might be improved.”
McErlane was surprised at Conrad’s serious interest. He had expected Conrad to say the business would be sold or closed down.
“Well, you know, we go along. Timbermen that want to replant just leave a few seed trees and let the trees do the job. Nobody’s got any money these hard times even if they believed in planting seedlings. Which they don’t. But a guy from Weyerhaeuser come around a month or two ago asking questions about how we set up, where we get the seeds and all. I think they might be planning to get their own nursery going. They have the money to do it — they are the only timber people making a profit.”
“And my grandfather Dieter was doing this fifty years ago. I wonder if there is not a real future for our seedling nursery.”
“That would be my thought,” said McErlane.
They talked and walked through the other glasshouses — there were five, all old and in poor shape. It didn’t take Conrad long to discover that McErlane was as ignorant of new research and knowledge on seedling propagation, cloning, forest genetics and site preparation as Conrad himself. He was putting his hands on a finicky complicated business that called for extensive knowledge on the part of both the seedling grower and the planter.
“I have to back up,” he said to McErlane. “I don’t know what I need to know. I have to go to forestry school. I think we can keep the greenhouses running as they are for the clients that still depend on us until I learn enough to map out a new plan. One thing is sure. Seedlings are the best way to keep forests alive.”
That night he made a list of questions. What would be the needs of future seedling buyers? McErlane had been raising and selling “will grow anywhere” pine and spruce bare-root seedlings, but there was evidence that most of these died when planted on rough logged-over sites. Site preparation would help, but what companies could afford the labor and machinery in these times? He strained to put his mind into the future, when the need for timber would press harder. Which species would timbermen demand, what were the diseases, what were the best planting sites and how should the sites be prepared? Nature’s most dramatic way of replenishing the forest was fire. Loggers could duplicate such sites by clear-cutting and burning the slash. But which species did well in burned-over land? Which would suffer from possible invasion by wild grasses and plants?
He enrolled in forestry school, and as he studied he saw more and more difficulties. The real knot was the timber industry. He would have to persuade logging companies and lumbermen that their future was linked to his; if they wanted trees to cut in the future, they would have to plant new seedlings among the stumps. They would have to learn to think in decades and hundreds of years. They could not depend on leaving a few wild trees to seed the barren cuts — experience showed there was poor regeneration. Again and again, as he asked questions of college experiment stations and men who had tried reseeding, he came back to the same difficulty — site preparation was vital; timbermen had to see that doing the work and paying the costs was to their benefit. Conrad made a decision. Breitsprecher would offer site preparation as a service.
In the forestry school he heard of someone who had made kraft paper cylinders, filled them with soil and planted a seed in each. These seedlings did better than those with bare roots when set out on the same site. But was it practical to grow seedlings this way? Practical matters demanded experimentation. He had to include research in his plans. And there were costs. A square foot of nursery space could produce how many seedlings of what species with what labor and time and maintenance? Were there optimum or minimum sizes for seedlings? Were there limits? Yes, there were always limits — he had to find them. Finally, could the seedlings be priced to allow some profit or should he just hope to break even? For already he was inclining toward philanthropy, using his uncle Charley’s legacy.
• • •
By 1939 he knew enough to work out a long-range plan. He built new greenhouses and set up a seedling experiment with eleven tree species. Al McErlane was busy with two new workers, Pedro Vaca, a young Mexican who told fanciful but amusing tales, and Hank Stone, the son of German immigrant grandparents who had changed their name from Stein during the Great War. A separate building was a small laboratory-office though he had not yet found the research horticulturist or plant breeder that he wanted. He had liked Elsie Guderian, one of the few women enrolled in the forestry school and interested in plant heredities, but she had another year before graduation. “Once I’ve got that degree…” she said, indicating she wanted the job. She was stocky, with hard red cheeks and horse legs, but a true researcher. What he wanted.