About the nursery

I'm Doug McGregor, nurseryman. It is an old word for an old trade: raising young trees and plants and getting them into other people's ground. I came to it late. I was born in Brandon, Manitoba in 1980, wrote software for most of my working life, and started Oak Summit Nursery in 2020.

We live on 52 acres of aspen forest just outside Brandon: gently rolling sand hills, with oaks and hazel and wild raspberries, chokecherries and saskatoons growing through it. Oak Summit is the name of our road, and only for the one mile stretch that runs through the forest where we live.

The nursery is a corner of the backyard we carved out of that forest. It began as one small greenhouse. Today it is about a quarter acre of in ground beds and potted stock inside an acre of deer fence. In the middle is a fifty foot greenhouse I built myself, with a root cellar dug into the hillside behind its back wall. The permanent beds hold a growing collection of fruiting plants, named cultivars and wild species alike, all chosen for one thing: they survive our -40 winters.

How I got here

My background is software. I have been writing code for 33 years, since I was a teenager in the early nineties. I worked on games through the nineties and early 2000s. A small internet startup in my twenties got me into web hosting and online marketing, and let me travel. Several more startups followed, building software to run a business.

Later, working from home to get away from it all, I fell back into woodworking. It was therapeutic, and it grew into a small manufacturing business that I ran for a decade. I built a shop in 2015 and spent my days at a CNC router.

I got to work with all the cool wood. Live edge slabs cut from local logs that were headed for firewood. Burl salvaged from old trees, stabilized and cast in resin. Gabon ebony, cocobolo, ziricote, snakewood. I could tell more than a hundred woods apart by the smell of their sawdust. My favourite was verawood, one of the hardest woods in the world. Cut it or sand it and it fills the shop like a strong perfume, and over the years sunlight turns it from yellow to a deep forest green.

Oak Summit has been a long time coming. After a few decades of startups and working for myself, this feels like something I could do into old age.

Finding value in the overlooked

I have always been drawn to the natural sciences, and to botany most of all. What I like best is finding value in what gets overlooked: the wild plums on the ground, the acorns no one picks up. Collecting seed all around the province feels like that. The photos and field notes on this site are my way of showing people a bit more of the natural world.

I also like to experiment. I have trials going with apples and pears grafted onto our local wild saskatoon, and with wild plum and Toka grafted onto our wild chokecherries, both directly and as interstems, the short bridging piece between a rootstock and the variety on top. The rose family is more graft compatible than it gets credit for. It is a funny feeling to try something the internet says is impossible, watch it work, and wonder which part of the Venn diagram you are standing in.

Pomologica is a project I have dreamt about for years. It comes from reading old research station bulletins, books and papers. That research, this nursery and the experimental orchards around it are all an attempt to answer one question: what can actually grow here, in our corner of southern Manitoba?

A year at the nursery

For most of the year it is just me. I plan, collect seed, and sow it in the greenhouse. I graft, and trade for hard to find cultivars. I take cuttings and root them under timed mist. I grow a bed of a hundred kinds of tomatoes under isolation nets.

Summer and fall are for fruit tourism: collecting fruit and visiting other orchards in our area. I volunteer with a local nonprofit that is planting a community orchard, and I host grafting workshops. I travel the prairies for a few Seedy Saturdays each year and help organize the one in our own city. I forage tree and perennial seed wherever I can find it, and I trade with and buy from other Canadian seed harvesters to add to what we grow and what we offer.

The nursery carries a very wide range of seeds and plants for its size. That diversity makes the logistics harder, and a large business would probably not do it this way. I would rather have the widest collection I can.

The whole family, twice a year

Seeds go out by letter mail all year. Then come two very busy shipping seasons, fall and spring, when the whole family picks, sorts, packs and ships: my wife of 25 years, our three daughters, and my father in law. I am a father of three girls, and now a grandfather of two.

We are a craft scale mail order nursery, shipping across Canada.