Environmental regulators have fined a Tennessee wholesale nursery $2,500 for shipping hemlock tree seedlings infested with a destructive invasive species to customers in upstate New York.
The infested eastern hemlock seedlings were shipped to Oswego and Schenectady counties in April 2017.
The seedling trees were infested with hemlock woolly adelgid, a tiny insect that has killed tens of millions of hemlock trees as it spread northward from the Appalachian region.