“Do you realize, my children, that the man whose mind is made up can no longer advance scientifically?”
This is what Charles Bessey, botanist and dreamer, once said. He believed possibility had no bounds.
Bessey created something no one could have imagined – a 20,000-acre pine forest in the middle of a ‘wasteland’ of Nebraska. And yet, today, this lush sanctuary – now the Nebraska National Forest – is a fixture of the state’s landscape and something that hikers and hunters enjoy together.
“I mean when you look across it like this, it is kind of astounding that people planted all of it,” Julie Bain – supervisor of the forest – told Net Nebraska.
Within the forest is a nursery Bessey founded in 1902, fittingly called Bessey Nursery. Now, it is an enormous project managed by the feds, Mexican immigrants, and Richard Gilbert. Together they provide about three million seedlings to the nearby U.S. Forest Service in efforts to replant huge areas of land.
“If they have a natural catastrophe such as a wildfire, huge blowdown event, bark beetle, we are that backup,” nursery manager Richard Gilbert told Net Nebraska.
The seeds of Bessey’s ideas live on today in the little pines that the team nurtures into existence. This evolution of ideas and purposes is exactly the thing that would have excited him.
Feature photo: Ariana Brocious / NET News
