Trella’s Taizhou nursery is a vibrant, dynamic ecosystem. Each year we plant different varieties of seeds, and each year presents varying environmental, weather, and growing conditions as the seeds we plant grow into saplings. This diversity provides our customers with a better assortment of trees and also helps with disease and insect control. In our first cycles, we grew 16 different species; now, we are up to 24 species. There is a lot of variation in the crops, and many of them are unusual or rare in urban forestry in China. Specifically, 11 of them are on the State Forestry Administration Reference List of Major Cultivated Precious Tree Species in China (2017 Edition). The following precious tree species are currently being grown at our Taizhou nursery: Acer mono, Acer truncatum, Cercidiphyllum japonicum, Cornus wilsoniana, Eucommia ulmoides, Nyssa sinensis, Pistacia chinensis, Quercus variabilis, and Ulmus parvifolia. One species we grow, dawn redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides, was listed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, version 2013.1. That endangered listing is easy to understand when you realize there are only 18 wild populations, and they are cut off from each other. Growing trees experiencing this level of threat of extinction not only helps preserve the species, but also boosts biodiversity in China’s cities.
