GO NATIVE: BRIGHTMAN LOGAN ON HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND FINDING WHAT WORKS FOR YOU

Podcast interview with Brightman Logan, pioneer of the native plant industry.

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Host Mitzy Sosa interviews Brightman Logan with the assistance from Native Plant Horticultural Foundation Executive Director, Cammie Donaldson. Growing since 1981, Brightman reflects on the ecological specificity necessary for success and how specialization may be the future of native plant nurseries.

ABOUT OUR PODCAST

Go Native: the Business of Native Plants interviews seasoned native plant business owners and experts to help others learn from their successes and failures. 

Find monthly episodes wherever you find your podcasts, here on our blog or at https://rss.com/podcasts/gonative

Now listen to Episode 9 or read the transcript below to learn more. Go native!

TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE 9

Host: Mitzy Sosa and Cammie Donaldson

Interviewee: Brightman Logan

Mitzy Sosa 00:02

Hello! And welcome back to go native the business of native plants. My name is Mitzy Sosa and I am your host. We’re back with another episode. This time we are talking to Brightman Logan. The executive director of the Native Plant Horticulture Foundation, Cammie Donaldson sat in with me in this interview to learn more from a true pioneer of the native plant industry in Florida. Brightman started his nursery in 1981 in response to the 1979 federal and state mandates requiring no net loss of wetlands.

Cammie Donaldson 00:39
Brightman Logan has always been my go to person with questions about how the industry works and what is possible. Early on, he showed everyone, all our growers that we could produce native plants to a high quality standard in sizes that the landscape market needed. Brightman has always been a champion for working together, not apart. And that is really important for native plant movement.

Mitzy Sosa 01:02

Today, he is here to share what he has learned over the years. Welcome Brightman.

Brightman Logan 01:07
Oh, gosh, come along way.

Mitzy Sosa 01:10
It’s wonderful to have you with us today. Why don’t you start telling us what sparked your interest in native plants?

Brightman Logan 01:18
Well, I’ve always been interested in biology. And after I got my degree from Mercer University in 79, I started working for an environmental firm in Tampa. And this was just after they had passed the Clean Water Act, which required mitigation and restoration work to be done. So we had projects coming up, and we couldn’t find anybody that grew these plants. And that’s when it kind of just light bulb went off in my head and said, Well, that sounds like a great profession to get into. And I wasn’t really a horticulturalist as much as a biologist. So we had to kind of take a lot of learning steps to figure out how to grow these plants. Because there wasn’t a lot of information out there, like we have today on how to propagate and grow a lot of these native plants. And there were very few growers back then we started. We actually started in 1980, but didn’t incorporate until 1981. And just had a ton of projects that we got to the environmental consulting firms that we started working on. So it was, you know, it was different starting back then, because we didn’t have a lot of people growing the plants, and we had to figure out how to grow them too. So that was a big learning curve for everybody. I think back then.

Mitzy Sosa 02:37
It also sounds like restoration was the main goal. So not necessarily landscapes.

Brightman Logan 02:43
You know, our main goal back then was for restoration work. That’s what we were doing mainly. And later we got into landscape, doing landscapes and things like that as well. But I think everybody that initially got into it was tied into for restoration aspects. And it was interesting, the county agent here in my county, the extension agent, heard what I was doing, and he came out and he said, What in the world are you doing? Who’s Who’s gonna buy that? And I said, Well, you know, not a lot of people, but we got orders for 70,000 of this and 50,000 of that. He just couldn’t believe it. So it was, you know, started right at the beginning when all this stuff was cranking up. And we had a huge numbers of plants that we needed for these projects. So that’s kind of how I got into it originally. And we had some property where we had some peat bogs and stuff where we could get a lot of the aquatic plants. So we started doing that initially. And then just realizing that there was such a need for the shrubs and the trees and other things, too. We took all our profits from that and started building the nursery up.

Mitzy Sosa 03:50
At that point, how big was your nursery?

Brightman Logan 03:53
And we started with maybe half acre of nursery and by the time we finished we were close to 100 acres that we had under production.

Mitzy Sosa 04:01
Wow

Brightman Logan 04:01
I just think native plant movements come such a long way from when we started to think back how long ago it was now, you know, 40 years ago. And you didn’t see any native plants out maybe pine trees and oaks. And that was you know, as far as and then Myrtles wax myrtle. So there were probably three species of plants that they were using and landscapes back then we’re now we’ve got, you know, I see tons of landscapes now that have half at least 50% Natives. So I think the whole industry has done a great job on advancing forward but we still have a long way to go.

Mitzy Sosa 04:36
There’s definitely still a lot of work left to be done. So Brightman, what would be your advice for people that want to jump in and continue this work of growing natives? What would you like them to know before they get started?

Brightman Logan 04:51
Well, I wrote down a few things and I guess the first thing is to know the cost of your product that you’re growing. I think a lot of growers make a mistake and just they see somebody else’s price and a brochure and they put that down. And that’s kind of what we all did initially. But some things take longer to grow and are harder to grow. And, you know, we we’ve actually went in and figured out down to, you know, we’ve looked at the cost of the pot, the soil in that pot, we break it down the fertilizer, how much labor did it take to pot that and put it out on a mat? The mats that you lay down to put the plants on, we had it down to the square foot, how much it cost us for those mats to put down? watering time? How much watering time and how much did that cost you and what was the pH of your water, because a lot of times the pH affects the pH in your in your plants. And you have so much variation in pH and Florida plants that you want to make sure you get that right because the pH affects the nutrients and the water absorption by the roots of the plant. So when you maximize that for each plant, you’ll get better growth and healthier plants that way. Insurance, you know all these other things, that people just don’t figure into their business when they’re producing something. You know, your phone, your electric, how much does it cost you to weed the plants. So we tried to go back and look exactly how much all these costs. And it’s hard in the industry because a lot of people would come in lower than you were but you know, if you’re gonna run a business, you got to make a profit. And I think a lot of these a lot of people early on, and even us to some extent it was it was a business, but it was something that we had to do is you know, it was just like a, we were all called to do this, you know in advance the native plant use. And it actually to protect our state, you know, I’ve got lands- the landscape in my yard. Now I never fertilize it, I never water. And it’s thriving, it looks great. So that’s kind of what the goal was. But don’t getting into a bidding war with other nurseries, there’s always somebody that’s going to come along and undercut you. But if you’re growing quality material, that’s always gonna kind of rise to the top, and people will be willing to pay it. If they want it.

Mitzy Sosa 07:21
What would you recommend for people to start doing now so they can continue to grow quality product in the future?

Brightman Logan 07:27
Put your product, know your plant that you’re growing, read up on everything, you can get so much more information out now than what we had when we first started. But I think the most important thing is to go out on the woods into the habitats where these plants grow and look at the soil and take some measurements of the pH and so and see what they like and why they’re thriving in those areas. You look at a lot of like scrub plans. They don’t like any mulch at all on and a lot of people you see them in landscapes, and they’ll mulch them and they’ll kill the plants because those plants thrive on open areas. But these are the things you can see as you go out in the field and notice these plants are growing. Wow, look at that one, you know, it’s really growing nice. And why is that? You know, look, look at the surroundings, look at the habitat it’s growing in and you try to mimic that we even had different soil mixes for different types of plants. So for our scrub plants, we would have a real sandy soil with bark in it, so it would drain real well. But we would have to put all those on one mat because they had different watering regimes too. And that was an important thing to figure out our wetland plants we typically had more peat in there. So we had different soil mixes in different pH for we had like five different mixes that we would use for plants. You can’t do it for each one but you can get close enough to where it helps maximize the growth potential of those plants.

Mitzy Sosa 8:57
Well that brings me up to my next question. Oftentimes in a nursery there is a lot of different plants being taken care of at one time growing in the space. So there can be quite a lot of maintenance or cycles to make sure that you are keeping track of. Do you have any tips on how to make sure that you’re taking care of all of your plants that have different needs correctly?

Brightman Logan 09:23
Yeah, I guess like I was saying you have to put these plants that like these different types of conditions on separate mats because you water them differently. So we would take all our mesic plants or wetland plants from on one mat or scrub around another wildflowers one on different mats because you don’t need to water them as much or in smaller container. So it’s just thinking through and looking at it and just you gotta really think it through and you’re gonna make mistakes. That’s the other thing. You’re gonna make a lot of mistakes. But you can learn from the growers who’ve made the mistakes and what is all the growers are pretty much open on their techniques, now, some of them, they have proprietary things that they do. Like the tissue culture guys, they’re not going to tell you what they use to do things. And some of us growers have, like a certain product that we may be mixed in there that we won’t tell everybody will tell them everything else. But you’ve got to have some proprietary things, you know, to to help you keep above the rest. It’s a business, it’s not a hobby. And it was very rewarding. You know, we didn’t ever make a ton of money. But it was rewarding to be out there and doing what we were doing. Like we were pioneers, getting all this stuff started. And then I guess we kind of were, you know, seeing where it’s going nowadays.

Mitzy Sosa 10:44
For someone that is just getting started, what would you recommend they do to promote their nursery

Brightman Logan 10:50
I’ve talked about promoting the product and educating the public, the trade shows are very important. And then we even did our own workshops at the nursery, and we would bring all the plants together and get and we would mainly target landscape architects, landscape designers, city, county and state, parks people because they do a lot of work with natives. And we would have, you know, 100 and something people come to these and we’d be able to show them the plant talk about, they can ask us questions, we’ve done the same thing through FANN too. And that’s how you learn. And also just talking with your fellow growers, like I said, they’re gonna not gonna tell you everything, but you can learn a lot. I know, we were having a hard time growing a lot of stuff from seed and I went and talked to Nancy Bissett about it. And she was telling us the secret that they used on it was the type of peat they used. And that was huge for us, you know, it opened up a whole nother door. But, you know, we’re all kind of in the battle together. So we always like to share ideas. So that’s an important part, too is is network, the networking between growers is very, very important.

Mitzy Sosa 12:02
Yes. And a trade show is an exhibition at which businesses in a particular industry promote their products and services. Here in Florida, there is a couple of them. So we recommend that wherever you are listening to keep an eye out for nearby trade shows, you can go and promote your nursery. And Brightman, I want to switch gears here a little bit just to talk about some of the mistakes that you’ve seen people make in the past that you think might be holding them back when they first begin their nursery.

Brightman Logan 12:37
You know, I think now that it’s changed and you have so many more growers out there, I think growers need to specialize more into certain things. We’ve seen some growers do mainly scrub, some do Beach, some just do shrubs, some do trees. And I think to be able to meet the demand, we’re all going to have to kind of take our little niche and figure that out. And go with that. Now how many plants that is I don’t know. I mean, we started out we were growing almost 160 species of plants. And I know, again, I wasn’t a horticulturalist. But these guys from other nurseries would come out and they get how are you growing all that how you keep up with that. We grow 30. And we can’t keep up with it. But at that time, it was the demand and the necessity to have those plants available. But I think now with so many good growers out there, if people could learn to specialize, then we could grow more numbers. And you can concentrate on the quality of the plant you’re doing that point to you’re not trying to run and put fires out here and there trying to keep up with everything. You’ve got a better handle on it, and you’re growing plants that maybe work better for you. And one thing I’ve always found, you can hear techniques or things from other people. But each grower has their own way of doing things. And you could try what somebody told you and it wouldn’t work. But if you tweak it a little bit for yourself, that it would work. So take that information and glean it and then utilize it the way you know works for you too.

Mitzy Sosa 14:11
And what do you think are some resources that we still need to develop to help people in this industry?

Brightman Logan 14:19
I think a lot of it’s still being worked on but seed germination is one thing. We’ve had a lot of hard times trying to get certain seeds to germinate. Maybe they need a longer stratification, cold, maybe they need to be scarified when they’re not. You know think about like Palmetto seeds and things like that when the animal eats them and that takes the the endocarp off of it which is an inhibitor goes through their system, the acids and everything are like a scarifier or and then once that comes out, that’s that seed ready to go. So you have to kind of think about nature and how things work in Nature. I mean, we had trays, sometimes we would try growing stuff and it wouldn’t grow for a year. And we tow the tray out and go look back at the pile and everything germinate and start taking off. So it’s just one of those things again, you got to just kind of keep notes on and always be looking out there and experimenting. But there’s, there’s a lot of great information out there now you can just Google stuff. And I’m surprised, you know, I’m amazed at what comes up nowadays. That’s one of the things I wish we had all this when we started. And then you got things like, gaillardia, which Cammie can chime in on. We’ve been growing, this as a native plant. And now a week or so ago, they came out and said, well, we don’t think it’s a native plant now. And we’ve been saying for years. So this just part of the industry, part of what happened is on. But it’s interesting, because a lot of the growers who were against us years ago are now growing a lot of these native plants. And that’s pretty rewarding to to see them come in and start growing them and understand, you know, yeah, you can put a lot of this stuff out there and not have to do anything to it and just let it go and thrive.

Cammie Donaldson 16:10
You know, Brian, I’m going to step in there with a story that you will appreciate the very first native plant and service directory that I did for FANN, I use the picture of pink muhly grass that you gave me and put it on the cover. And then we shipped out all the directories. And I got a call from someone who had received the directory was not a FANN member. It was another grower, demanding and he was pretty insistent that I needed to properly identify what was this plant on the cover and wasn’t a native and you know, I gave him and, and he was like, Well, I’ve been in business for 30 years. And I’ve never seen that plant. And I said well, we would love to have you grow it. And now I think about that that was 1996 and now almost any highway or street you drive down, you’re gonna see muhly grass planting.

Brightman Logan 17:07
Mhm

Cammie Donaldson 17:08
And then,

Brightman Logan 17:08
Yeah.

Cammie Doanldson 17:08

-Yet it was so unusual at the time. So I use that as an example. It seems like a long time. Maybe to Mitzy. But Brightman and I can tell you that that was a blink of an eye. That 20 years.

Brightman Logan 17:25
And all of it’s happened in that time. Jeez.

Cammie Donaldson 17:27
Yeah, yeah.

Brightman Logan 17:29
But yeah, I mean, that was, you know, and I used to chastise the growers, I don’t, but just saying, Hey, you got the stuff in your back yard people. It’s right out there. It’s growing, why not take it and utilize it. And, you know, basically, I had to shame them into it. But I had a lecture in Tampa one time we had like 400 people there and all the growers, Tampa growers came. And I just started saying that, you know, this has been a change the palette that you use in your landscape growing these plants, they all stood up in unison walked out in the middle of my lecture. There’s like 50 of them. And the whole way out, I was just giving them grief. I just kept peppering them with stuff. Ended up being great friends, you know, it’s just it’s, it just makes so much sense. And that was another thing. I always thought if you notice a lot of those plants last about five or six years, and then they die. And they have to be bought again and replaced. I think that was one of the main things they kept those things because they could keep reselling them. I got plants here in my yard. I’ve been here 25 years, look great.

Cammie Donaldson 18:34
There’s two reports out nationally this year, Brightman, just addressing availability of native plants for restoration.

Brightman Logan 18:42
Mhm.

Cammie Donaldson 18:43
And, and one is from the National Academies of Sciences. And the other is I think from a another government agency, chronic nationwide shortage, chronic nationwide shortage. And am I right to believe that if there’s a chronic nationwide shortage of native plants for restoration, then wouldn’t there be even a greater shortage for landscape? Use?

Brightman Logan 19:10
Yes, yes, indeed. Yeah, I would agree with that completely. And it’s always been that way really. I mean, as we increase demand, we just never could keep up with it. It seems like a lot of people will get frustrated with that, you know, I can’t get these plants. And that’s why we started getting people to contract grow for projects. If you’re going to want these plants in a year, you’re gonna need to put some money down and start growing them up. I’ve got a school going on across the street from me here a vo-tech school. And we talked him into doing all native plants, plenty of great aesthetically pleasing natives. You know, the I guess the one thing too is they everyone wants evergreen, where they don’t enjoy the beauty of something being deciduous and maybe not having leaves for it.

Cammie Donaldson 19:56
Yeah.

Brightman Logan 19:57
There’s a lot of obstacles to overcome. We’re dealing with with the general public.

Cammie Donaldson 20:02
Yeah, that I think that issue of deciduous or seasonal plants, two big things that are needed, of course, the continued education, and you’ve got to make it much more accessible and consumable. And then we need those ecological landscape maintenance specialists. And they need to know how to package and sell that business. It’ll come I believe it will come.

Brightman Logan 20:27
Letting people know that third generation nurseries are getting into growing natives and all these people, you know, we got to kind of get the wave built to where are these kids get interested in it? And really, I mean, I think we’re doing a lot to save our environment in the state by doing this stuff. A day when we you know, we completely cut off our sprinklers, and wasting potable water on our yards and it can be done very easy. Which, just again, takes time and generational time to get those things done.

Cammie Donaldson 20:59
Brightman, I thank you very much for your time today.

Mitzy Sosa 21:03
Yes, thank you, Brightman. And thank you, everybody for listening to another podcast go native. I’m glad that we were able to explore some of the native plant industry history today. And we hope that we inspire you to take on whatever you can to continue to advance the work in the native plant industry. And continue listening to us subscribe right now to Go Native: The Business of Native Plants new episodes every month, and be sure to visit our website NativePlantHort.org to learn more and support us. We’ll see you next time.

More about Brightman Logan: Brightman may say he’s retired but he has remained an active force behind the scenes, supporting our foundation and important partners in Florida, including the Florida Wildflower Foundation and the University of Florida, where he has been instrumental in setting the stage for a future seed materials center to secure a native seed supply chain for the state of Florida.