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FAIRFIELD – Terri Diers loves to be outside, and she found the perfect occupation to satisfy that desire.

Diers is co-owner of Oakwood Nursery and Garden in Fairfield, which she and business partner Terry Klein founded in 1978. She credits her mother Erma Hartman with inspiring her love of the outdoors and of gardening. Hartman encouraged her daughter to pursue a career in horticulture, and that’s exactly what Diers did at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids.

While at Kirkwood, Diers participated in a work-study program that had her taking care of the greenhouse, mowing, tending to the vegetable garden, and a lot of other things she’s continued doing ever since.

“My thing is being outside,” she said. “I love to be outside and to be moving around all the time. That was another thing of my mother because she was a big walker.”

Diers said that, when she was in college, there was a growing focus on conservation and protecting the environment, and that appealed to her.

“I’ve always been a big environmentalist, ‘don’t step on the bugs,’” Diers joked. “No, I’m not that bad.”

After college, Diers had aspirations of working for herself instead of joining an existing lawn and garden business. She and Klein continued their education by taking additional classes in horticulture and floriculture from Indian Hills Community College in Ottumwa. Diers and Klein took classes in the winter and then worked at Oakwood Nursery in the summer.

“I’d always get a job in the winter like as a waitress, at grocery stores, clothing stores, just to keep busy,” Diers said. “You still have to pay your rent, and waitressing is really fun.”

In those early years of the business, Diers got some great advice from her banker, who told her not to try to get too big too fast.

“We wanted to build a big Morton building right off the bat, but he convinced us to build this little garage over here,” Diers said, pointing to the garage on the property that was the original office for the business. “It was from a kit for like $3,000, and we built it ourselves. We did business out of that little garage for probably seven or eight years.”

Diers said that part of Fairfield, on Oakwood Boulevard just off West Tyler Avenue, was not very developed at the time with few houses nearby. In fact, the garage did not have a bathroom, so guests had to use an outhouse.

Diers was married to Klein when the business started, but they divorced and Diers remarried. After that, Diers gave birth to children JD and Dana, and then built the new office building the business operates from to this day. Oakwood Nursery once had a flower shop but that came to an end about 23 years ago when they caught an employee embezzling money. Diers and Klein decided to close the flower shop after that, but they both remain busy with so many other parts of the business. That includes selling plants from their garden center including bare-root plants that they pot, designing and installing landscapes, and selling wholesale items to other garden businesses like bulk bark.

“We have really nice ornamental trees and shade trees,” Diers said. “We also grow in fiber pots, and they’re easier to take off later. You can put the plant in the hole and take this pot off.”

Diers mentioned that the bare-root plants arrive at the business with no soil. They’ve been put in cold storage and shipped with no soil so they weigh less. The business also has contracts to supply annual plants to local entities, such as Everybody’s Whole Foods grocery store.

“Watering is another big deal all summer,” Diers said. “All these years, we’ve never gotten irrigation. We’ve always hand-watered everything.”