Fedco Trees 2025

Welcome to Fedco Trees’s 41st annual tree order

Tidy rows and groupings of plants look good on paper, but life happens in the landscape—lots of life if you tend the soil and ditch the chemicals. And as we all know, life can be messy! The plants begin to roam and mingle. Wind and birds deposit seeds where we wouldn’t have thought to plant them. Trees and shrubs bend and torque in response to light and wind. Insects chew on leaves, birds eat your cherries, milkweed pops up where you planted a rose. Is this an invitation to relax into the unexpected? What might seem like chaos could also be perceived as wild beauty. We can choose to worry, wrestle and interrupt. Or we can pause, observe, embrace and participate.

We live in a society that conditions us to perfection and prods us to freak out so we will seek more products and experts to pave the path toward an ideal that will free us. Consider it an act of resistance to grow a garden without fretting over every spot on a fruit and every hole in a leaf. Pluck weeds, but leave a few volunteer wildflowers to mingle among the cultivated ones. Let the plants participate in finding their own order. What will unfold is a diverse garden that hosts all kinds of bees, birds, insects, snakes, toads and amazement.

When we allow this kind of mingling, disease and pest pressure lessens, and the blemishes don’t stand out so much. We need green things in our lives for food and beauty. We need diversity, too, for learning, delight and to foster a rich, healthy ecosystem both on the land and in our minds.

Looking back at 2024: We bid farewell to two longtime Trees workers. Laura Childs, who curated our perennials line for the last fifteen years, is shifting gears to curate Fedco’s art department. She remains our on-call herbaceous expert. Also, we extend our gratitude to Elizabeth Smedberg for steadfastly guiding our warehouse operations through rapid growth in the last decade. Everyone who has ever worked here—whether for a few weeks or for decades—remains part of our story. Their contributions shape who we are today.

What’s new? We are the excited recipients of a Thrive grant, which we are using to make much-needed improvements to our tree storage facility and to fund the installation of refrigeration that will be hooked up to our solar array. This will allow us to keep plants fully dormant longer. After 40 years of relying on increasingly unreliable cold winters to cool our shop, we had to say uncle. We’re also rolling out new software to sync up our systems and provide you with better service. Our old system from the early ’90s is dying. We ask for your patience while we work out the bugs.

Keep an eye out for an in-person Surplus Sale in later May if we have leftovers. Come say hi to us at the various events we will attend over the winter (check website for details). Look for more varieties online as we harvest our crops and make final inventory decisions.

As always, we welcome your comments. Got a good plant story? Send it to us. If we print it with your permission, we’ll send you a gift certificate.

– Jen Ries and the Fedco Trees team