By Bill Ward
Published in The Boerne Star on February 6, 2004
Bill and Jan Neiman of Junction, Texas, were honored with the Fellows Award for special service at the 2001 Symposium of the Native Plant Society of Texas (NPSOТ).
When their names were announced as winners, the entire audience rose to give the Neimans a standing ovation.
That spontaneous demonstration of real admiration came from an audience who knew that the contributions of the Neimans went far beyond their service to NPSOТ.
The Neimans are the principal suppliers of native wildflower and grass seeds in Texas.
They also are leaders in the movement to conserve natural resources and to restore and maintain the health of the environment.
Their company Native American Seed not only supplies native seeds for Texas gardeners, it also ships thousands of pounds of seeds every year for use in the highway-beautification programs of the Texas Department of Transportation.
In addition, it provides grass seed and consulting services for many prairie-restoration projects being done by national and state agencies as well as private landowners.
Native American Seed is not just another company that markets wildflower and grass seed. The Neimans’ company sells seed harvested entirely from native plants.
Other seed companies find it a great deal more profitable to purchase much of their seed from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Bill Neiman feels “morally obligated” to supply truly native seeds to his customers, even though the difficulties of harvesting and the vagrancies of Texas weather ensure an uncertain profit.
Bill Neiman also is dedicated to educating the public about ecologically-sensitive land management. He is an inspirational and entertaining speaker, who spends most of his precious-little free time talking to school classes and adult groups such as the Boerne Chapter of NPSOT.
The company’s website (www.nativeamericanseed.co m ) contains а wealth of educational information about restoration ecology on all scales, and the annual “seed catalog” is a beautiful primer on landscaping with native wildflowers and grasses.
How did this entrepreneur come to feel so “morally obligated” to being a strong advocate for good stewardship of the environment?
From early childhood Bill Neiman had an interest in growing plants. As a boy in the Dallas area, Neiman watched both his grandmothers’ cultivating plants, one in an urban yard and the other in a rural setting.
He experienced the pride and joy of growing plants himself when a seed he received in a Sunday-school program grew into a tall stalk of corn.
When he was 10 years old. Neiman’s family moved to El Paso, and there he learned the difficulties of raising a vegetable garden in a desert climate.
Neiman left school in the eleventh grade and spent two years hitchhiking around the US. Later, while camped out in north-central Texas, he took only five days to finish correspondence courses for the twelfth grade.
Then he worked for a friend who ran a garbage-collection service around Argyle, Texas. south of Denton.
At 19 years old, Bill Neiman started his first company, Neiman Environments Landscape Construction Company. He borrowed a shovel, rake. and lawnmower and advertised in the garbage collector’s monthly billings.
In a few years the company was big enough to take on large commercial projects.
Neiman ran that business for 18 years.
In the meantime, he met Jan when she was a college student in Denton. They married and began to raise a family.
For many years Neiman used the common exotic landscape plants, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides.
The increasing pollution of the Trinity River basin and severe weather of the early 1980s made Neiman reconsider his approach to landscaping.
The parts of north-central Texas that best survived the extreme droughts and devastating floods were areas with native vegetation.
Bill Neiman became a strong advocate for the use and conservation of native plants in landscaping, farming, and ranching. From 1979 to 1990, he also operated Neiman’s Native Plant Nursery in Flower Mound, Texas, and he farmed several sites certified for organic food and seed production.
Native American Seed was established in 1989 to specialize in the harvest and sale of wildflower seeds and prairie grasses native to the Texas-Oklahoma-Louisiana bioregion.
When the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex expanded over much of the Blackland Prairie and Cross Timbers, the Neimans decided their business and their two children would benefit from a relocation.
After scouting out several areas, including Costa Rica, the Neimans settled in Junction in 1995.
The company name “Native American Seed” stems from Neiman’s high regard for the Native Americans’ relationship with the natural environment before European settlers came and from his dream that one day “Native American Seed” can be applied to seed suppliers throughout the Americas, from Canada to Argentina.
At the moment, Bill Neiman is one of a kind, and we’re fortunate to have him in the Hill Country.
