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Welcome to Go Native Tree Farm. We are proud to offer the largest selection of Eastern native woody plant species available anywhere. We continue to add new species and have increased our growing capacity. We love native plants here at Go Native Tree Farm. Preserving natives is great for many reasons. For example, less care is needed once established. Some species can up to grow 5′ a year and make a shade tree in little time, saving electric, adding property value, and offsetting hundreds of carbon emissions pounds.

Go Native Tree Farm is pleased to offer a superior selection of container-grown US eastern native plants for the wholesale and retail customer.

Notes:

  1. Locations. We have an office address and a nursery / farm address. You are welcome to visit our native plant nursery located at 678 S Chiques Rd, Manheim, PA 17545.  We are by appointment only so please contact us at [email protected] to schedule a date & time that works best for you. 
  2. We use email to track your order, so email is the preferred method of contact. As of March 2020, we have a new email address. It is [email protected]. Because our former email provider service is gone, the previous email address [email protected] is no longer in service. Please email your plant requests to [email protected]. This allows us to track your order in our system and helps assure that you will get the plants when you need them. As always, if you’re offline, old-fashioned, or on the road, you may pick up the phone and call 717.399.0195 prior to a pickup so that you can ensure that we will be there to help you.
  3. We have removed the order form from the web site. Please simply email us your plant list with shipping address and POC phone number, and we will send you a quote.

 Our Business Model

We have developed a business model that serves as our foundation:

  • We seek to offer wholesale and retail customers essentially any and all of the nearly 500 eastern North American native woody plant species.  When we started the nursery, many native eastern plants of environmental or landscape value were not available anywhere (and they never were). Many more were extremely difficult to source. We and the industry have come a long way since then. Try us before you tell your customer that they will need to accept major species substitutions. We hope you will be pleasantly
    surprised. Our principal goal is offer a total solution for your native plant project.
  • In addition to being a grower, our business model is to source large and small plant orders for our customers. Often the job calls for specific mixes of species and plant sizes; it is often not reasonable to expect one nursery to have on hand the total best match for a given project.  We operate within a plant material supply network in the Mid-Atlantic and northeast US. Our goal is to offer the customer the closest plant material to ideally match your specifications list. We will source and supply the plants, and provide delivery options as well.
  • We will work with you to figure out the best way to get the plants to you. Unlike many nurseries, we will ship or deliver plants as appropriate. You can come to the nursery if you are close by.
  • We continue to expand our species list, and we support regional native plant sales where you can talk to us and purchase native plants in person.  The species list can be found in the “Price List” link; check the “Events” link for details about upcoming shows. Please check back frequently for updates on new plants and events.
  • We also offer advice on the best selection for your needs. We invite you to contact us, preferably by email, to receive a free recommendation for a native tree mix.  You will need to provide us with information on where you are interested in planting.  This should include location, hillside versus bottom-land, whether the site has limestone bedrock under it, direction of slope, and your desired results. We invite you to visit the selection of our native nursery farm-grown trees listed on the product price list. We also invite
    you to contact us to locate any native eastern tree or size not listed, and we will locate it for you. We offer quantity discounts for wholesale and large order customers. Please consider to use email first for sending plant wish lists. It helps us both to use a single primary way to track your quotes and orders.
  • We offer trees for a variety of applications:
    • Naturalization stock for residential lots and recovery projects.
    • Conservation and reclamation projects such as the Federal CREP program.
    • Specimen trees.
    • Orchard stock for fruit and nut producers.
    • Landscape plants.

Specialty Areas

  • Some specialty focus areas for us include:
    • We have thousands of hickories in propagation; we have developed an affordable approach to volume production of the eastern hickory species (Carya spp.), see the web site section on Hickories for more information. We can offer an affordable license to other growers for the Carya propagation methods and equipment that we have developed.  
    • We have inventory of pure American chestnuts. We have been propagating Castenea dentata for 20 years using increasingly blight-resistant, 100% American Chestnut stock. See the web site essay on Solutions for American Chestnut for more information. Our mother trees are now up to 50 feet tall and 20 years old. 
    • Most of our plants are grown in containers. This seems to suit the plants. Quite a few of these species were rarely or never propagated before now.  
    • We offer herbaceous native species for wholesale customers.

Most of the trees we grow are started from local native seed sources. We collect these seeds ourselves from plants with good health and seeds. A focus is on native fruit and nut trees, troubled and rare native species, and climax species found in the oak-hickory forest prevalent in the mid-Atlantic region.  It can require hundreds of years, if not longer, for nature to regenerate the varied mix of native climax forest trees once present on cleared land. 
Through our business, it is now possible to immediately restore original forest species.

Due to increased request for photos of our plants we have made a Facebook page, featuring some of our most popular native trees and shrubs. We will be adding more photos of rare species. Please visit us on our Facebook page. www.facebook.com/pages/go-native-tree-farm

About Us

 We are a family-operated small business located in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  Lancaster County is widely known as the Garden Spot of Pennsylvania, and is famous for its well-kept farms and Amish tradition. We have been in operation since 2001, and we began as a father-son project in an effort to develop a sustainable multi-generation agribusiness to retain our family farm. We are now an established grower.

John Rosenfeld, PE, owner and co-founder. Being the eldest son, he has strong background in agriculture. Regional woody plant botany specialist, chemistry, R&D, technology business management, and (a bunch of other stuff). He holds an MS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan (1984).  John is also active in aerospace and thermal engineering technology development.
Rachel Kling is our Office Manager. She has been admirably handling RFQs, quotes, and orders for us for over 5 years. She has an Associate Degree in Business Administration.
We have a great supporting group of people who help make all of this happen. We handle thousands of plants every year. Without them, none of this would be possible. We are proud to hire locals seasonally, and give back to the community.
The business continues to grow; we welcome the opportunity to grow our network and support staff along with it.