If you see pine trees growing in rows in Southeast Georgia and North Florida, there’s a good chance it started as a seedling on a reddish hill in Wayne County.

The Plum Creek nursery and orchard are off a dirt road near the Wayne-Brantley county line. It is there that Kyle Owens manages the growth of 34 million pine seedlings, loblolly and slash, that should be well over five inches by the end of July.

Most of them are loblolly, he said, because, “in 15 years, lob seems to outgrow the slash.”

That many pines are needed because the nursery supplied 25.4 million seedlings that Plum Creek planted in Georgia and Florida in 2012. With 750,000 acres in timberland, Plum Creek is Georgia’s largest private landowner. It owns 448,000 acres in Florida, most of it concentrated in Baker and Columbia counties south of Osceola National Forest and in Levy County on the Gulf. In Georgia, many of the seedlings have a short trip for planting with Plum Creek’s largest concentrations of land in Wayne, Brantley, Charlton, Camden and Glynn counties and others in McIntosh, Long and Bryan. About half of Plum Creek’s land is from Macon north, but it’s in much smaller plots.

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