As Harlan Hamernik grew the Liatris wildflower seed at Bluebird Nursery in Clarkson, a farmer plowed the prairie where the original plants had grown. A customer had dropped the perennial seed off with Harlan after collecting it from the tall spikes with poofy purple blooms. Unlike other Liatris, this variety didn’t fall over. It exists today only because of the nursery.

Harlan and his wife, Shirley Hamernik, started Bluebird Nursery in 1958. Still family-owned today, it has provided major employment in the small town of Clarkson, grown and shipped tens of millions of plants throughout the United States and survived change and challenges.

Harlan and Shirley were born in Clarkson in the 1930s and grew up in the Czech immigrant community. Clarkson’s population has remained steady at around 600 people for decades. It’s the kind of place where neighborhood kids run in packs and feel welcome playing on anyone’s porch. Located three miles west of the NE-91 and NE-15 junction in Colfax County, Clarkson draws tourists every year during its annual Czech Days, a celebration with music, street dances, Czech food and a beer garden.

Harlan and Shirley graduated high school at 16 and 17, attended more school and married at 20. They hoped to buy the Clarkson newspaper and moved to Iowa so Harlan could study Linotype, a typesetting system. To support themselves, Shirley worked as a med tech and Harlan worked in a nursery. Someone  bought the paper before the could return to Clarkson, but working in the nursery had ignited another idea in Harlan for a hometown startup. He found the greenhouse building he needed for his venture in Lincoln, but first he needed funds to buy it.

 “I’m very sorry, young man,” the Clarkson banker said to 20-year-old Harlan. The bank couldn’t lend Harlan $500 for a greenhouse. What could he possibly do with such a thing in small-town Nebraska? Now, if Harlan wanted a couple cows, the banker said, that was a different story.

Harlan’s dream to grow containerized vegetables, flowers, trees and shrubs wasn’t just far out for a Nebraska lending institution in the late 1950s, it was a new idea everywhere. Back then, greenhouses were mostly the domain of florists who wanted to grow cut flowers. Customers seeking plants bought them by the dozen wrapped in newspaper at the grocers.

Fortunately, nothing incentivized Harlan more than proving someone who said he couldn’t do something wrong. For the nearly 50 years that Harlan ran Bluebird, he obsessively hunted fields and forests for new seed, hired a biologist to help clone and propagate unique species, expanded his greenhouses and its offerings and traveled the world to learn as much as he could about plants.

Rod Ackerman came on board as Harlan’s science guy more than 30 years ago. He also served as Harlan’s chauffeur on domestic plant-hunting adventures. Years ago, on a trip with some other plantsmen searching for unusual plants in the Sandhills, they walked into a cafe that “hadn’t seen a stranger in years,” Ackerman said. As soon as the men walked in, “all those old ranchers stopped talking and stared.” All the outsiders except Harlan sat down, trying to be inconspicuous and just enjoy a bite. Harlan worked the room. The next thing Ackerman knew, “we had a handdrawn map of places to visit.”

“No” wasn’t in Harlan’s vocabulary. After the bank refused him, family helped buy the greenhouse, dismantle it in Lincoln and reconstruct it in Clarkson. From the start, family support and loyal employees were integral to the business’s success. 

Harlan And Shirley’s three sons helped at the nursery from a young age. They plunged their shovels into the still-cool spring earth and dumped the fragrant loam into wheelbarrows. It was getting close to bedtime, but Dad told them they needed to finish one more batch. Using an electric sterilizer, they heated the soil to 170 degrees to kill weed seeds and disease organisms.

When the boys weren’t in school, they spent their time shoveling dirt, planting seeds and stapling together wooden containers for the nursery. Plastic pots weren’t available. 

Today, the Hamernik brothers, Tom, Chuck and Mike, run Bluebird. Tom manages operations and staff. He knows his plants, but he lights up when he speaks about the trees he planted in the town park with a Nebraska Statewide Arboretum grant or the saplings he nurtures around a family-owned pond. Chuck is the numbers guy and a guitarist who plays in two bands and has spearheaded efforts to preserve the Clarkson Opera House. Like his father before him, he served as the town mayor. The youngest Hamernik brother, Mike,  remains a Bluebird owner and helps with shipping. He also works as a pilot and flight instructor.

The brothers do things a little differently than their dad did. The times have demanded it. Back when Harlan started Bluebird, it was a new business model. Other startup nurseries and plantsmen willingly shared new discoveries. The retail side of the business still thrived, and big box stores hadn’t swallowed up most of the mom and pop garden centers.

One morning in January, Tom packs plants in a cardboard box illustrated with the company logo – a bluebird with a red-blossomed flower in its beak. He stacks the finished box onto a dolly. A worker will wheel it onto a waiting truck to load.

Bluebird sells more than 1.1 million perennials, herbs, succulents, grasses and wildflowers to garden centers, landscapers, mail order firms, botanic gardens, parks and zoos each year. That day’s shipments are heading to Arkansas, Ohio and Illinois.

Workers buzz around, some bobbing their heads to pop music piped through speakers. It’s chilly in the warehouse – and in many parts of the eight acres of Bluebird’s greenhouses growing 1,450 varieties of plants. Part of growing plants hardy enough for the Midwest is to start them off cold.

On a tour, Tom points out one of Bluebird’s most beloved plants. Years ago, his dad discovered a Heuchera variation in a seedling plant and propagated it. Heuchera sanguinea, or “Snow Angel” was the result – a plant with creamy white and green leaves and cherry pink flowers. Currently dormant, its leaves blush a subtle pink. Only a single stem on one plant heralds the coming arrival of spring. A flushed filament, so thin and new a camera lens can’t even focus on it, rises from its body’s slumber to greet a new season.

 The heady floral scent of lavender mixes with the sharp woody fragrance of rosemary in one of the warm greenhouses. There, Bluebird Nursery employee Sherilynn Hawkins is sowing seeds in plastic trays. She uses a device created by Harlan – a hair clipper outfitted with a spade. As the clipper vibrates, the seeds fall evenly into the rows. Then she sprinkles the entire tray with vermiculite.

Harlan used to give plants away for people to try, Hawkins said. One time a group of women from Omaha rolled up in a limousine to see the nursery. Deeply pleased, Harlan packed their vehicle so full it seemed the leaves waved goodbye from the windows.

Bluebird Nursery’s slogan is “If they’ll grow in Nebraska, they’ll grow anywhere.” It’s a promise they’ve kept with the help of employees, like Hawkins. 

For “40-something” years, Hawkins has trialed the nursery’s new perennial offerings at her place, she said. She plants them on a windy hill at her acreage, where every winter temperatures regularly drop below zero. If they make it through, it builds confidence that the nursery’s customers will be satisfied too. But some of Bluebird’s offerings were never intended to live in Nebraska’s winter climate.

One frigid night in January, a critical piece of equipment failed in the succulent greenhouse. Staff rushed to salvage what they could. They stacked piles of green gummy waste on one side of the greenhouse and set up a triage station to save damaged but still-living specimens. They could potentially grow new plants from these extremities, but it would take time before the plants became sellable. Meanwhile, they had to tell customers their orders were delayed – or worse. 

Longtime Bluebird employees Cathy Schroeder and Pam Hamernik – who is Chuck’s wife – are working on cuttings one morning a week after the event. Poking shallow holes in soil on trays, they “strike” the plant – horticulture-speak for placing a piece of a plant in a medium to grow a new plant. They have a lot of orders to fill.

“We were joking that it’s like the Biblical story of the loaves and fish and all the people to feed,” Schroeder said. “We have a lot of people to feed right now.”

“Too bad we can’t also turn some water into wine,” Pam said, raising her eyebrows and smirking at Schroeder.

They burst out laughing. Nearby, Shirley Hamernik, the 85-year-old family matriarch, who’s stopped by for a visit, leans into Pam with a wry smile and gives her a hug.

Shirley was the backbone of the business for many years. When Harlan was dreaming and scheming, she was getting payroll done and designing, writing and laying out the sales catalogs. Sometimes she filled the role of short order cook, too.

Throughout the years, various foreign groups visited the nursery to learn about its perennial growing operation as one of many stops in the U.S. One evening, a Tibetan group and their University of Nebraska-Lincoln hosts were forced to cut short a trip to Western Nebraska, because of an impending snowstorm.

Shirley had to throw together a last-minute dinner for a dozen and prepare beds in the nursery’s adjoining bunkhouse for the Tibetan visitors. She whipped up a spaghetti dinner with pie and ice cream for dessert.

Shirley drafted a UNL professor to set the table since she was still busy cooking. The group lingered happily over dinner. Later, the Tibetan guests shoveled the sidewalks and had a snowball fight.

The next day, a university host admitted to Shirley that he’d initially been skeptical about the stop in the little Nebraska town, but seeing Bluebird and meeting the Hamerniks had been a highlight of the group’s trip.

Shirley is happy to recall the memories – even after her husband’s untimely death.  

The shockwaves from a home explosion that took Harlan’s life in 2012 reverberated throughout town and around the world. A life flight helicopter rushed him to a Lincoln hospital, where he died from burn wounds. He was 76 years old. 

It was a tragic irony. Harlan was one of the first people in rural Nebraska to get his EMT certification and work as a volunteer firefighter in his community. It became a family vocation. Tom, Chuck and Mike continue to serve as community firefighters in Clarkson. Mike’s son, Corbin, is an Omaha firefighter.

Harlan had retired from Bluebird five years prior to his death, but he was still pursuing his love of horticulture with a new company. H.H. Wild Plums focused on hardy trees and shrubs, like persimmon, chokecherry and wild berries.

If a plant could describe Harlan’s life, maybe it is the red-stemmed Missouri evening primrose he discovered in a Western Oklahoma wellfield and brought back to Nebraska to cultivate.

The clear, bright yellow flower thrives in tough environments and blooms through a frost – it doesn’t take a no. Harlan selected the plant from the most colorful specimens he collected and named it Comanche Campfire, for the land of its origin.

As for the nursery and its people, the Dazzler candy lilies best reflect their characteristics. Developed at Bluebird, Dazzlers come in brilliant shades of pink, yellow and orange. Each flower is beautiful on its own, but a field of them together creates an unforgettable tableau.

In late summer, every year, a native wildflower, called penstemon, blooms alongside Interstate 80 outside of War Axe State Recreation Area, east of Kearney.

For years, Harlan and Tom collected seed from the unique offering of pale pink and purple flowers with a tube-like cup. Later, after Harlan’s death, Tom went alone.

As his dad had done, Tom warred with the roads department to delay mowing until he could collect seeds to cultivate the plant at the nursery. It was an unbelievable plant. They couldn’t get enough of it. They just needed a little more time.

Today the nursery doesn’t chase down wild plants or try to create new varieties – that was more Harlan’s hobby. Tom and Chuck devote their efforts to providing customers proven perennials and serving as a generous small-town employer. In doing so, they honor their parents’ original goals.

The nursery industry has undergone big changes since Bluebird’s beginning – more specialization, changes in popular taste, loss of family-owned garden centers and the rise of big box stores. In the past year, supply source challenges have also posed difficulties.

Bluebird is trying to find its way forward amid much uncertainty, Tom said, but one thing about the nursery’s future is beyond doubt – it will always be a proud Clarkson business that grows Nebraska hardy plants.