The Diakon Wilderness Center is nestled between State Game Lands 305 and the Appalachian Trail at the northern tip of South Mountain, in Cumberland County. It has to be the most picturesque place to find a native plant nursery, let alone the 15,000 square foot greenhouse. To access it, you drive in on a gravel road for 2 miles, frequently passing closer and closer to a small mountain stream called Little Dogwood Run. By the time you notice the dense Cinnamon Fern colony growing along the stream, you’ve arrived.
The Wilderness Center is a branch of Diakon Youth Services, which runs the campus primarily as a retreat center for at-risk youth in Pennsylvania. They provide a safe place for young people to turn their lives around and build life skills that will help them succeed into adulthood. One of the services they provide is horticultural training, the art of growing and cultivating plants. Those students, under the direction of Kim Patten, run the greenhouse and native plant nursery. Did I mention that the greenhouse also functions as a biofilter for all the wastewater that is produced at the center? They do this to prevent pollution and protect Little Dogwood Run.
The native plant nursery was founded in 2015 with a large donation of infrastructure and plant inventory from the now retired Meadowood Nursery.
I was first introduced to native plants when I worked for Meadowood during a few summers between college semesters. So it’s only fitting to return to the pieces of that legacy that remain. To be honest, the legacy lives on in the knowledge and appreciation that was spread initially from Jan Getgood and Ernie Johnson, who owned the nursery in Hummelstown, PA. Today we can continue to enjoy those plants and the knowledge with them through the Diakon Wilderness Greenhouse.
