Growing Wild: why I am giving this away

Series opener & Red Oak

Planet Healers

Aug 13, 2026

I spent twenty years growing native plants for a living.

Acorus Restoration, on a farm near Long Point in southern Ontario. We got to around 350 species and became the largest supplier of native wetland plants in the province. Plants went out to projects in Canada and the US. Then in 2014 I loaded the farm cupboards into a pickup and drove south, and I have spent the last 11 years on 39 hectares of overgrazed limestone in the Yucatán, watching it turn back into forest. 514 species documented there now, and I planted almost none of them.

So I know how to grow this stuff. That knowledge took decades and a lot of dead trays to build, and most of it has never been written down by anyone.

Here is the problem it solves.

Restoration projects fail for want of plants. Not for want of money, or enthusiasm, or good intentions. People secure a site, they raise the funds, they get the permits, and then they find there is nowhere to buy 4,000 plants of the right species grown from seed collected anywhere near them. So they buy what the nursery trade has, which is a handful of easy species in the wrong genotype, and five years later the site is thin and half of it is dog-strangling vine.

The bottleneck is people who know how to grow the plants. There are not enough of them.

That secret knowledge sits in the heads of a few hundred nursery growers, most of them my age, and it dies with us unless it gets written down and handed over. Some of it is in the agricultural literature in language nobody outside a university reads. Most of it exists only as the kind of thing you learn standing next to someone who says: collect that one on September the 11th, clean it outside, thirty days wet, and do not let it dry out.

So that is what this column is. Every Thursday, one species. What it does in an ecosystem, when to collect the seed, how to clean it, what dormancy it has and how to break it, how to germinate it, where to plant it out. The real numbers from my own charts, not general advice.

Some of it will be species you have heard of. Red oak, butterfly milkweed, cattail. Some of it will be plants almost nobody grows, and those are often the ones a site actually needs.

I am not doing this to sell you anything. Almost everything I have made is free: the books on the Path, the workbooks, the course, the app. The three propagation books are the exception, because they are built around original photographs of the seed, the seedling and the mature plant, and those took years to make. If you want them, they are at planethealers.org. If you do not, every species in them will come through here anyway, one week at a time.

There is a version of environmentalism that stays inside its own room, talking to people who already agree. I have watched it happen for thirty years, and it is the single biggest reason this work is underfunded and understaffed. Knowledge kept inside the room is not knowledge doing anything.

You do not need a degree for this. You need a bucket of sand, somewhere cold outside, and someone to tell you when to collect. Acorns are sizing up now; they drop in about six weeks, and there is exactly one thing you have to get right. Growing Wild is my three-book propagation series: Trees of Life, Prairie Wild and Wild Wetlands. planethealers.org.

Red oak

Quercus rubra

Everywhere I go, I see the old fence-line oaks. One tree standing alone in the middle of a field, the last of a woodlot that got cleared a hundred years ago. Most people drive past them. I slow down, because every one of those trees is a seed source.

Red oak is the easiest tree I know to grow from seed. It is also the one that feeds the most. The acorns go to squirrels, jays, deer, and turkeys. The leaves feed the caterpillars of hundreds of moth and butterfly species, and those caterpillars are what the nesting birds are actually hunting when you see them working an oak in June. You are not planting a tree. You are planting the bottom of a food web.

The acorns take two seasons to mature, so good crop years come and go. Watch the ground in mid-fall.

One thing matters more than everything else. The acorn must not dry out. There is no envelope, no shelf, no waiting until spring. You collect, and you plant, the same week if you can.

Growing it

Collect from the ground under a healthy tree in mid-fall, and leave most of them. The jays were there first, and they are better at planting oaks than we are. Float-test if you like: the ones that sink are usually sound.

Plant straight away, about as deep as the acorn is wide, in a nursery bed or in the ground where you want the tree. No stratification needed, no storage, nothing to manage over winter. Any soil, medium moisture, half sun or better. Hardy to zone 3 or 4 depending on where you are.

Then wait. The first few years look like almost nothing is happening above ground, because everything is going into the root.

An oak you plant this fall will outlive you. Somewhere near you there is a fenceline oak still standing over a field, still dropping acorns nobody collects.

Growing Wild is my three-book propagation series: Trees of Life, Prairie Wild and Wild Wetlands. This one comes out of Trees of Life, my guide to propagating native trees and shrubs. 124 species profiles, seed treatment, cuttings, and how to run a small nursery without spending much. It is one of the few things I charge for. The book is built around original photographs, and what it earns pays for the parts of the Path that stay free. https://ko-fi.com/planethealers/shop