Jesse

“I tried so hard not to take this place,” says Jesse, owner and manager of the Fort Collins Nursery. He bought the business from his dad, who ran it for 34 years.

“My first job ever was, when I was maybe five or six years old, counting seeds into seed packets out of a bulk bin and sealing up the envelopes and pricing them—stuff like that,” Jesse remembers.

Later on, during his high school and college years, he worked at the nursery most summers. But for a long time, he resisted the idea of stepping into his father’s shoes. He thought, “I don’t want to just do it because it’s what my dad did. I’m going to figure out what I want to do with my life.”

So he left Colorado, studied Spanish at a school in Oregon (a state he claims “catfished” him with its beautiful spring), and made Portland his home for several years. But he missed Colorado’s weather and his family. He found the city sorely lacking in human connection. And he couldn’t quite escape his roots.

“I kept working with plants, and the story I told myself was: it’s just because that’s what I know how to do.”

Then he got a call from his dad.

“He had developed Parkinson’s, and it was getting bad enough that he needed to get out of the business. He said, ‘I need to retire. Don’t feel like this is me saying you have to take over the business, but if you think that there’s a possibility you want to, this is the last chance you have to get in as a family member.’”

“I stopped and looked back and said [to myself], ‘You know, I do speak Spanish, and I’m—I mean, not to pat myself on the back too hard—‘I’m pretty smart. I’m pretty good at figuring things out. If there was something else I wanted to be doing, I probably would have at least tried something else by now, but I keep working with plants, so maybe there’s something to that.’”

In 2008, Jesse moved back to his hometown. He purchased the nursery two years later. 

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the business hit a roadblock—but it picked up speed far sooner than Jesse anticipated. In May, he was calling every employee he’d been forced to lay off months before.

“Because everybody was staying home, houseplants just blew up. Everybody was landscaping, and they realized they’re spending so much time at home. They’re realizing: ‘Oh my God, my neighbor can see right in my window—I need to plant something there,’ or ‘I’m hanging out on my patio, and my yard looks like garbage. I want to spend more time here.’

“It was some of the busiest few years that we’ve ever had historically—and not by a little bit. . . . It was amazing to see that when the going truly gets rough, that’s where people turn to.”

Looking ahead now instead of back, Jesse’s working hard to build the nursery’s reputation.

“We’re growing a lot more plants, so we have a lot more to choose from [in terms of] what we want to sell here . . . and so the more that we grow to support our wholesale side, it also helps our retail side. It allows us to get into growing some really niche products that are really unique to Colorado . . . hard-to-find native plants and unique evergreens and conifers.”