The Meridian Seed Orchard, owned and operated by the state Department of Natural Resources, is an island of funny-looking trees in a sea of spreading suburbia.
The former strawberry farm on Meridian Road has served as a major source of tree seeds for state forestlands and small family forestland owners for about 35 years.
It's a place where branches from the most adaptable, productive and disease-resistant conifer trees from forests of the state are planted in the ground in hopes they will produce seeds that carry the parent trees' good genetic makeup.
Because the orchard trees grow from branches, not seeds, they often are floppy and asymmetrical, in stark contrast to the trees their seeds are likely to produce.
"Seed trees are not that good-looking," said Jeff DeBell, a DNR silviculturist and geneticist who manages the seed orchard and oversees genetic research there.
"I remember the first time I visited the seed orchard," state Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland said the other day during a seed orchard tour with visiting foresters from British Columbia. "I thought there was something wrong with the trees."
In one respect, the 110-acre site is valuable real estate in a high-growth area near Yelm Highway and Lacey.
But DNR has no intention of selling off the property. It represents the state agency's only intensively managed seed orchard and plays a key role in reforestation of state and some public forestlands, DeBell said.
Neighbors around the seed orchard often ask about the future of the property, said seed orchard employee Rocky Oster.
"They wonder if it's going to be turned into a housing development," Oster said. "The fact is, we're hoping to stay here a long time."
The blocks of orchard trees represent different species from different geographical areas, or provenances, from all over the state. They include Douglas fir, which is the primary species, and white pine, larch, noble fir and Western red cedar.
By definition, a seed orchard is a plantation of specially selected trees managed for the production of genetically improved seed.
"For a lot of years, we produced west side Douglas fir seed only," DeBell said. "It's still our biggest product, but in our new orchard blocks, we're including trees from all over the state."
The Northwest community of forest geneticists and researchers are just beginning to work on projects to figure out how to adapt seed orchard production to changing forest ecology driven by climate change, DeBell noted.
"For the future, are these even the trees that we want?" DeBell asked rhetorically.
On the other hand, a radical shift in seed production based on a climate-change model could prove to be a costly waste of time if certain climate predictions don't hold true.
"This is very difficult for us," DeBell said. "It's all about managing risk."The Olympian
