The nursery that grew from one woman's backyard

Dona Marlene Souza started raising seedlings in pots behind her house in 2019, on a stretch of cleared ground beside the river. She knew which trees fruited in which month and which seeds needed soaking or scarring before they would germinate, because she had spent fifty years watching the forest do it.

When Tomás first met her she had a few hundred pots and no buyer. What we added was modest: shade cloth, a water tank, some seed trays, and a contract that promised to buy what she grew. The knowledge was already hers.

Her nursery now supplies about a fifth of everything we plant across the basin. More to the point, she grows 140 native species, many of which no commercial nursery in the region bothers with because they are slow, awkward to germinate or have no timber value. Those are exactly the trees a recovering forest needs and cannot easily get.

She employs nine people now, most of them her neighbours, several of them women who had no cash income before. The work runs year round, sorting seed, filling pots, weeding and hardening off, so the wages do not vanish between harvests.

Her stock is some of the healthiest we plant. She is paid in a way that rewards seedlings that survive in the ground, not pots filled, so she does not push out weak plants to hit a number.

When we hit a tree that refuses to come up, the lab notes and the textbooks are usually the second place we look. We ask Marlene first, because more often than not she has already worked it out.