The Story of OGN

The concept of Oak Grove Nursery began as many of our projects do, as a dream of Kevin W. Smith, while landscaping on the East end of Long Island in 1989. With a degree in Agronomy, he always wanted to farm. With the price of land and insurance increasing, pursuing this dream in Long Island would not be possible. With three small kids in tow, Kevin and Evyonne started looking for a new place to pursue their dream. They searched up and down the East coast finally finding a place in Tennessee. Not knowing a soul except for real estate agents, they decided to pack up the kids, dogs, a 52’ moving van, trucks and equipment and move to Tennessee.

With his dream firmly planted in his mind, Kevin started out very small and planted his first crop of B&B production in the spring of 1990. Soon after noticing B&B would take a considerable amount of time and space to profit, he added budded pears and dogwoods along with a few propagation beds. During this time, Kevin drove a tractor-trailer Sunday through Thursday, to support his family, while his wife, Evyonne Smith, worked on the nursery with Kevin’s help on the weekend. This was definitely a family affair. The Smith family was often found working together on various projects such as hoeing and making cuttings. Since his main work force was his wife and kids, Kevin decided to convert the nursery into a bareroot operation to better suit his family.

A very happy day occurred in early 1995, when Evyonne decided that with so many phone calls to handle and orders picking up, the nursery had reached a turning point and Kevin could come off the road. Within the next two hours, his employer was contacted and notified that this would be his last load as a truck driver. This was definitely not the end of hard times, but with the family back together, all seemed a lot brighter.

With both Kevin and Evyonne working together, the nursery started growing in leaps and bounds. They were soon up to 24 propagation beds and budding around 30,000 dogwoods and 12,000 pears. As they sold off the B&B and land was opening up, more dogwoods, pears, stock blocks and propagation beds were added. Kevin walked out each block layout considering land and water conservation, along with ease of maneuvering large trucks and equipment. In 2000, his time and effort paid off when he was chosen as Outstanding Conservation Farmer recognizing his exceptional conservation of soil, water, and related resources.

Having grown up in a family owned and operated agricultural business; Kevin’s children could not imagine not being a part of a business they helped orchestrate. By May 2005 both daughters, Jessica and Katie, had graduated college and were heading home to join the business.

The nursery had expanded to nearly 100 propagation beds, sticking 55 beds each summer including more than 25 different Viburnum varieties. We were budding close to 100,000 dogwoods, 30,000 pears and lining out 35,000 Ornamental Cherries. In order to take advantage of fresh knowledge and young ideas, we decided to diversify our product line by adding a container operation specializing in native trees and shrubs. One main objective was to combat the root system issues of many native plants without using chemicals. Another was to produce our own rooted cuttings and seedlings. After research, we decided on Carl Whitcomb’s Rootmaker® Products. Oak Grove Nursery now has a containerized product line of nearly 200 native plants and a production area which can house 70,000 containers.