Robert Seip walks the path from his propagation greenhouse in the background up to the farmhouse where he grew up. At his left are potted cuttings and seedlings growing to a saleable size.
Robert and Cindy Seip own and operate Lennilea Farm and Nursery in the Village of Huffs Church, where Robert grew up and the couple has held a nursery license since 1975.
Robert Seip (right) and his stepsister Anna (Kemp) Moyer show off their catch in this old family photograph.
A native nut grove includes hickory, pecan, hican and shell-bark hickory trees.
Inside the large greenhouse at left, Cindy Seip and son Lowell grow annual flowers, vegetables and herbs, which they sell at their on-farm produce stand.
A gift shop on Lennilea Farm sports a green roof.
Cyprus knees protruding from the ground above the root system of a bald cypress tree help stabilize the tree in soft and muddy soil, catch sediment and reduce erosion. Robert Seip said these trees offer an excellent alternative to willow trees for planting in wetlands.
Inside the propagation greenhouse, an “artificial leaf” signals when to turn the misters off when it gets saturated enough to fall and flip the switch.
Bald Cypress, like this specimen on the Seip farm, will grow in USDA Plant Hardiness Zones 5-11. Robert Seip explained the native conifers were pushed by glaciers 11.000 years ago from the Great Lakes region, where they can still be found, down to the sea and spread via their seeds from Southern Canada to Florida.
Robert Seip walks the path from his propagation greenhouse in the background up to the farmhouse where he grew up. At his left are potted cuttings and seedlings growing to a saleable size.
HUFFS CHURCH, Pa. — Mention Lennilea Farm Nursery to a fan of native flora in this neck of the woods, and chances are their eyes will light up as a knowing smile creases their face.
The 180-acre farm in the Village of Huffs Church in southeast Berks County is tucked behind the historical house of worship that gives the town its name.
Robert and Cindy Seip own and operate Lennilea Farm and Nursery in the Village of Huffs Church, where Robert grew up and the couple has held a nursery license since 1975.
Robert and Cindy Seip have made a living in cooperation with that land, in some way, shape or form, since they were married in 1960.
It is Robert’s boyhood home. He moved there in 1938 when he was 9 years old after his mother took up residence with Floyd Kemp, who purchased the farm and was a lineman by trade. The couple had a daughter together, Robert’s half-sister, Anna (Kemp) Moyer.
Born in 1929 and raised for a time by a single mother during the Depression era — his father left when Robert was 2, and his parents later divorced — Robert lived through lean times.
Robert Seip (right) and his stepsister Anna (Kemp) Moyer show off their catch in this old family photograph.
His fondness for useful plants, both in the garden and in the woods, was borne partly of necessity as neighbor Nora (Landis) Nester, then his stepfather’s father, Will Kemp, and later a local legend who went by the colorful moniker Mountain Bummy, schooled him on gardening and propagating as well as foraging for wild native edible and medicinal woodland plants.
Wild lettuce became one early staple of sustenance.
“Anything out there that was edible, we picked,” Seip said after a recent hot morning battling weeds with a string trimmer, followed by a hearty lunch of fish shared by a friend and broccoli from the garden. “Baskets of raspberries and wild strawberries ... We made tea out of things like sassafras and birch.”
Cindy Seip recalled browsing Mountain Bummy’s bookstore in Niantic after she and Robert were married.
Bummy (Lamar W. Bumbaugh) was also a furrier — Robert and Cindy would eventually have two sons and two daughters, who would sometimes run trap lines and sell him pelts — and according to published work by food ethnographer and writer William Woys Weaver, an herb pappy or powwow doctor. These healers were believed to be able to mystically communicate with plant s.
A native nut grove includes hickory, pecan, hican and shell-bark hickory trees.
Considering all the academics and other tree trekkers who have visited Seip from near and far to study his grafting techniques, visit his collection of rare and unusual trees and maybe select something special from the greenhouse where he meticulously propagates them before setting them outside in larger pots waiting for a permanent home, one might imagine he has taken on some of that otherworldly ability.
Inside the propagation greenhouse, an “artificial leaf” signals when to turn the misters off when it gets saturated enough to fall and flip the switch.
Seip milked cows for about 50 years from age 16 after starting his own herd through a vocational ag program in Boyertown.
“I got a free calf,” he recalled. “It was the Sears R oebuck Foundation that gave quite a few calves away to needy farm children. And that was the foundation for my herd. The majority were purebred animals.”
With the help of artificial insemination and some luck — “We didn’t get many bulls,” Cindy Seip said — the herd grew to 45.
The couple — who met at a hoedown in Lenhartsville in May 1960, got engaged in June and were married that November — sold the milk herd off in 1995, but continue to raise some steers.
By the time of the dispersal, Robert had long been considered an expert on propagating woodland plants, especially native nut trees and minor fruits such as pawpaw and persimmon, and Cindy was continuing to grow her green thumb.
They had held a state nursery license since 1975 and had been operating a garden and ornamental plant and tree nursery business.
“The native things I mainly tried to establish in our woodland,” Robert Seip said. “I didn't harvest them. I just tried to establish them. I brought a lot of trees and things into the area that I think we have a need for.”
Bald Cypress, like this specimen on the Seip farm, will grow in USDA Plant Hardiness Zones 5-11. Robert Seip explained the native conifers were pushed by glaciers 11.000 years ago from the Great Lakes region, where they can still be found, down to the sea and spread via their seeds from Southern Canada to Florida.
Seip gestured toward a towering bald cypress tree to make his point.
“Most people think a cypress tree is a Southern tree from Florida,” he said. “They’re hardy from (USDA Plant Hardiness) Zone 5 to 11, I believe it is. And, actually, the scientists said they were native to Canada and the Great Lakes area, and like 11,000 years ago they got pushed down to the bay. There’s still remnants of them up in the north. But it's a wonderful timber. The Unadilla silo, that's what they used for the roof, because it's rot-resistant.”
Now, Seip said, cypress timber nearly all goes into mushroom houses because it does not impart odor or flavor to the cash crop like other woods will.
Cypress trees, which can be cheaply acquired from Southern sources and are perfectly hardy in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, have another potential critical role to play, he said. They offer a more sensible alternative to willow, routinely recommended for planting in wetlands.
“It's a better tree than willow,” Seip said. “The government ... they still tell you to plant willow. And what's wrong with the willow is this: They grow well in wetlands and along the streams. But you plant them along the stream and you get floods, and the floods undercut them, and they all go down to 45 (degrees).”
They also tend to exacerbate, rather than curtail, erosion, he said.
Cyprus knees protruding from the ground above the root system of a bald cypress tree help stabilize the tree in soft and muddy soil, catch sediment and reduce erosion. Robert Seip said these trees offer an excellent alternative to willow trees for planting in wetlands.
“Cypress trees, they stay where you put them. Flood or high water, they stay. And the quality of the timbers is great.”
That stability, he said, is aided by the cypress knees that poke through the ground above the root systems like wooden gnomes.
One of Seip’s greatest passions is the American chestnut, an important tree in this country’s history devastated in the first half of the 20th century by chestnut blight, a fungal disease that came from Chinese chestnut trees introduced from East Asia.
For years, Seip has been selecting for resistant specimens of these fast-growing deciduous trees in the beech family and has several stalwarts on his farm, but he said there is another possible key to their return, currently held by the government.
“They have created a GMO one, same as we have GMO corn,” he said.
The government has not given permission to plant these trees, he said, for fear they could become invasive.
Inside the large greenhouse at left, Cindy Seip and son Lowell grow annual flowers, vegetables and herbs, which they sell at their on-farm produce stand.
“Which they were, to some extent,” Seip said. “You know, when our forefathers came here, they were all over. They cut them down. They made rail fences. They built their houses out of them. They did everything imaginable with these chestnut trees. So they were maybe a little invasive, but without them our country would have been in worse shape.”
“Invasive” can be a matter of opinion, Seip said, and doesn’t have to be an alien species imported, purposely or accidentally, from another country — though some of the most familiar invasives are, including the ailanthus (aka tree of heaven, native to China and Taiwan) that has proven a hospitable host to the spotted lanternfly, or the multiflora rose imported from East Asia on ornamental rose rootstock in the mid-19th century.
“Another bad one is bittersweet,” Seip said of the perennial vine native to North America. “It's a beautiful one with orange fruit ... They give you a prize at the Oley Fair for bittersweet, but it's a noxious weed. Birds spread the seeds for miles, they come up all over the place with tangles, and it’s just a harmful plant.”
Humans perpetuate the problem, he said, by cutting the vines for decorations at Christmastime and then throwing them out.
“It’s just as bad as multiflora rose, in my mind,” he said.
Patents on plants raise another interesting issue, he said. While companies aren’t supposed to be able to patent native plants, he recalled one local friend, Joseph Volk, who died in 2010, collecting a certain native dogwood variety for decades and sharing it with Seip. Then it was somehow patented, he said.
“I’ve had it for 30 years, about,” he said, “and now I can’t sell a piece from it anymore.”
It’s pretty clear longtime friend Ted Stokes considers 93-year-old Seip as much a national treasure as the American chestnut.
“Robert has been inspirational to a number of people,” Stokes said. “His knowledge of propagation ... It’s a disappearing art. He understands, from his own experience and observation, how to make things grow. His genius is that he’s a farmer who understands nature. He’s lived a long life, and he’s paid attention.”
It is a long life worth emulating, Stokes suggested, if one wishes to live a long life.
A gift shop on Lennilea Farm sports a green roof.
“He’s always willing to try new things ... and starting new projects,” Stokes said. “His interest doesn’t die. He’s a good example to people like me who are getting older and may be getting a little foggy to keep trying new things.”
Seip’s imparted knowledge has not been confined to the nut grove, Stokes said. “He’s also taught me things about farming not connected with plants, like how to get a tractor unstuck.
“He has knowledge, he puts it to use, and he shares it with people.”
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Dan Sullivan is the Digital Content Editor for Lancaster Farming and a former editor and writer for the Rodale Institute’s NewFarm.org and Organic Gardening and Biocycle magazines. He can be reached at dsullivan@lancasterfarming.com or 717-428-4438.
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