Waco, Texas · Wholesale to professional landscapers and re-wholesalers
Wholesale trees for Waco landscape contractors
The farm is on FM 2187 outside Sealy, under three hours from Waco, and it is Highway 6 nearly the whole way, up through College Station and Marlin. Out after breakfast, walk the rows, tag the exact trees your plan calls for, and home for supper. About 30,000 container-grown shade and ornamental trees, #30 to #300, wholesale only. What is ready to load today is on the live availability list, open to anyone, no login.
Highway 6
Buying trees for a Waco job without buying them sight unseen
A large-caliper tree is not a commodity, and two trees of the same variety and caliper are not the same tree. On a Waco job the difference between the two is a day on Highway 6, and on a big order it is a day well spent.
Come out, walk the block, and tag the specific trees going on the job. Approve the quote and those exact trees are held for your ship date, so what arrives in Waco is what you stood in front of in Sealy. Read the availability list before you set out: it comes from the same records our sales team quotes from, so it says what exists in which sizes, and the drive is for choosing rather than for finding out. On a small order, the list and a phone call do most of the work.
Bring the plan. It is easier to say which side of the river a tree belongs on while looking at it.
Which side of the line
The trees we grow that belong in Waco, and the five we would not send
Our Dallas-Fort Worth page draws the hardiness line at Waco, and standing in Waco that line runs through the middle of our list. February 2021 is why: 205 straight hours below freezing here, longer than Dallas had, and the coldest readings since 1883. Waco is zone 8b on the map and North Texas in a bad winter, and this list is written for the bad winter.
- Shumard Red Oak Quercus shumardii The big deciduous shade tree for the black clay most of Waco is built on. Fast for an oak, red in November, and tolerant of the heavy alkaline soil that gives other red oaks fits.
- Bur Oak Quercus macrocarpa A Waco native, on the ridge tops in Cameron Park and in the old cemeteries. Takes the clay, the limestone, the cold and the drought, and outlives whatever is built around it.
- Live Oak Quercus virginiana Native on the Cameron Park ridges, and the evergreen on most Waco plans. February 2021 took the fine growth off a lot of them and they came back; specify the escarpment side of the family where you can, and give it the warm side of a site.
- Texas Live Oak 'Joan Lionetti' Quercus virginiana x fusiformis Live Oak with the Escarpment Live Oak in its parentage, which is the cold-hardy side. Uniform in a row, happy on alkaline soil, and the Live Oak we would put on a Waco street after 2021.
- Chinkapin Oak Quercus muehlenbergii The white oak of the limestone country, so the ground west of the river, out toward Woodway and the new lots beside Lake Waco, is its home. The oak that oak wilt troubles least, and McLennan County has oak wilt.
- Texas Red Oak Quercus buckleyi Spanish oak on the city's own list of native vegetation. The red oak of the escarpment, smaller than Shumard, at home on the bluffs and the thin soil west of the river, and fully hardy here.
- Lacebark Elm Ulmus parvifolia Cedar Elm is the native elm on the Cameron Park ridges; Lacebark is the nursery elm that does the same job in a parking lot, with resistance to Dutch elm disease and no complaint about compaction or alkaline soil.
- Bald Cypress Taxodium distichum On Waco's native list and the Brazos River Corridor's significant-tree list both. The tree for the river banks, the Lake Waco shore and every detention pond, fully hardy, and dry-tolerant once established. On the thinnest limestone it can go chlorotic.
- Texas Mountain Laurel Sophora secundiflora On the city's own native vegetation list, which puts it above the hardiness line here when it sits below it in Dallas. Slow, evergreen, purple in March, and after 2021 it gets the warm side of the site, not the exposed one.
- Mexican Buckeye Ungnadia speciosa Also on Waco's native list. Pink flowers on bare wood in early spring, yellow in fall, happy in the light shade under a bigger tree and on the limestone. The small tree for the understory.
- Crape Myrtle 'Natchez' Lagerstroemia 'Natchez' Hardy, mildew resistant, and the tall white crape myrtle on medians from here to the Red River. The bark alone carries it through a Waco winter.
- Taylor Juniper Juniperus virginiana 'Taylor' Eastern Red Cedar was the first tree back on the Cameron Park ridges when the pastures were let go, and Taylor Juniper is a narrow selection of the same species. The vertical evergreen for a formal row where an Italian cypress would not last.
We grow thirty-two varieties in all, and the rest of them are on the full list. Five are deliberately missing from the twelve above. Mexican White Oak, Montezuma Cypress, Anacua, Palo Verde 'Desert Museum' and Podocarpus are Central and South Texas trees, and a winter like 2021 cuts them back or takes them outright, so we would rather say so than send them. Austin, a hundred miles down I-35, is where they start. Mexican White Oak is the one people ask about, because it is the oak wilt answer in Austin and San Antonio; in Waco the oak wilt answer is Chinkapin and Bur, which no winter will touch.
Clay, limestone, and the river bottom
Which tree goes where in Waco
The Balcones Escarpment runs from Del Rio up to Waco and stops, and the Brazos cut through it here to make the bluffs in Cameron Park. East of the bluffs, which is most of the city, is Blackland clay. West of the river, out toward Woodway and the two thousand new lots going in beside Lake Waco, the limestone is at the surface and the soil is thin. And along the Brazos and the Bosque is the bottomland, deep and damp, where the pecans and the cottonwoods grow.
Cameron Park is the reference. On its ridge tops the natives are Live Oak, Cedar Elm and Eastern Red Cedar; on its floodplain, Pecan, Black Walnut, American Elm and oaks. Our list maps onto that: Live Oak, Bur Oak, Chinkapin, Texas Red Oak, Mountain Laurel and Taylor Juniper on the high ground and the limestone, Shumard and Lacebark Elm on the clay, Bald Cypress and Shumard in the bottom. Southern Magnolia 'D.D. Blanchard' and Southern Magnolia 'Little Gem' are clay trees here, planted all over the older neighbourhoods on the deep soil and chlorotic on the limestone west of the river. For the hottest, driest ground, Desert Willow 'Sweet Bubba', Vitex 'Shoal Creek' and Arizona Cypress 'Blue Ice' go where the sprinklers will not reach, and the Arizona Cypress wants the limestone side, not the clay.
Waco's water is Lake Waco, and when the lake falls to 80 percent of capacity the city goes to two watering days a week, and to one day at 50 percent. Everything above gets by on Waco's rain once it is established, which is the point of choosing it.
Sizes
Caliper for Waco site plans and the Brazos River Corridor
Waco writes its minimum into the parking lot: one tree for every 25 spaces, at least 3 inch caliper measured six inches from the base and 5 feet tall, or two trees at 1.5 inch. A site-work permit has to map every existing tree of 8 inches and over, and inside the Brazos River Corridor overlay a 6 inch oak, pecan, Cedar Elm or Bald Cypress is a significant tree with its own rules. We grow from #30 to #300, which runs from about 1.5 inch caliper and 5 feet tall up to 7 to 8 inch caliper at 16 to 18 feet.
That 3 inch minimum is the number to know. A #45 tops out around 2.5 inches and will not meet it no matter how carefully you tag; the #65, at 3 to 3.5 inches, is the size that does; and a #100 is a considerably bigger tree than the parking lot asked for, with the equipment bill to match. Around 800 trees at #100 and larger are in containers here today, more than half of them Live Oak. Container grown above ground means the whole root system comes with the tree, so it establishes faster than a field-dug tree of the same caliper and can go in the ground in most months of the year.
What each container size gets you What a container size gives you
Delivery
Delivered to Waco job sites, or loaded at the farm
Freight is stated on every quote before you bid, so the number you carry into the bid is the number you pay. There is no line that appears later.
We deliver across McLennan County: Waco, Woodway, Hewitt, Robinson, Bellmead, Lacy Lakeview, China Spring, McGregor and Lorena, and to Temple and Belton down I-35. From the farm it is Highway 6 from Hempstead to the Brazos, under three hours. If your own trailer is coming south anyway, you are welcome to load at the farm instead and keep the freight off the job entirely.
Contract growing
Multi-year Waco developments, bid on trees that already exist
McLennan County has grown by better than a tenth in ten years, two thousand home lots are planned west of Lake Waco in two developments alone, and the Brazos Promenade is remaking the riverfront downtown. That work is built in phases, and a phase three that needs two hundred matched Shumards is not something anybody sources in the month it is due.
Contract growing puts your name on specific trees while they are still growing here, at a price agreed at signing, so a job two or three seasons out is bid on trees you can drive down and look at today. About 1,500 trees are growing under contract for one customer right now, so this is a process we run rather than one we describe. The usual terms, including the deposit and the progress payments, are written out on the home page.
Request pricing
Send us the plant list for your Waco job
Send the list and we will tell you what we have, what we do not, which side of the line each tree falls on in Waco, and what it would cost delivered to the site. We sell to professional landscapers and professional re-wholesalers only. If you are a homeowner, your landscaper is welcome to call us.
Build your own quote Request pricing
Or call (210) 736-0146, or email trees@topnotchtreefarm.com. The farm is at 3153 FM 2187 Rd, Sealy, TX 77474, and here are the directions.