A note of support for specialty nurseries
Digging Dog Nursery, Albion, California, was one of the first few West Coast specialty nurseries to offer perennials more available in Europe.
As a child besotted with plants, I used to have my mother mail my letter and a dollar or a check for nursery catalogs. It was exciting to open the mailbox for them – I would spend hours poring over the pages of descriptions and photographs. One was the catalog of the still extant Logee’s Greenhouses in Danielson, Connecticut –a booklet of slim rectangular proportions printed on glossy paper. Many of the begonias, citrus, herbs, and passionflowers in its exhaustive listings tempted me. The catalogs from Greer Gardens and Roslyn Nurseries included magnolias and rhododendrons and woody plants that made me dream about creating my own private arboretum. Nowadays many of these catalogs have gone, and I miss the sense of anticipation that I had checking the mailbox each day to see what had arrived.
I always try and seek out a specialty nursery to visit when traveling. I was in Los Angeles last February for my brother’s wedding and convinced my parents to visit Nuccio’s Nurseries with me. Started in 1935 by Italian Americans who saw a promising market selling azaleas and camellias, Nuccio’s is in Altadena, north of the San Gabriel Valley and run by three members of the family. They wait patiently on customers, and is run on an honor system for payment (credit cards aren’t accepted). If customers are unable to pay with cash or checks, they are able to mail in payment after purchase. The level of service even impressed my mother who later recommended the nursery to family friends who lived locally. This attention to detail and service has been echoed at other specialty nurseries I have visited in the US and aboard. In the Bay Area, Robin Parer of Geraniaceae not only accommodated our desire to see her production greenhouses, but she also graciously organized two wonderful days of garden sightseeing in the Bay Area after my friend Taylor and I sent her an enquiry about visiting. Taylor herself, with her partner Ed Bowen runs a specialty nursery in Little Compton, Rhode Island (their nursery, Issima, is one of the few profiled here).
Stock plants maintained for propagation in Robin Parer’s Geraniaceae production greenhouses near San Francisco, California. The bold orange labels identify the plants clearly,
In the world of ornamental plants, people have not embraced preservation and cultivation of annuals and biennials, bulbs, perennials, and trees and shrubs in the manner in which heirloom and old fruit and vegetable varieties have been stewarded in recent years, but there was a brief period in the early-mid nineties when baby boomers—creatively ambitious, educated, and flush with disposable income— supported specialty nurseries across U.S., both in search of the newly discovered and time-honored garden plants. They clamored for the choice perennials seen in English gardens, the seemingly exotic tropicals they came across in their travels in Hawaii and Caribbean, and the trees and shrubs being discovered by plant explorers traversing in east Asia. During this time, one could easily find at least five places that sold pelargoniums, several dozen that dealt in woodland perennials or rock garden plants, and others that focused on just one or two esoteric genera. As the baby boomers aged and relinquished maintaining complex and elaborate gardens, the market for these plants dwindled, and many of these nurseries, bereft of sales, thanked their customers for their patronage and closed their doors.
Issima Nursery where the breeder’s paint brush and the aesthete’s eye for good garden plants collide artfully.
Any specialty nursery still in business deserves our patronage, as do the new ones being started on occasion by the next generation of horticulturists. They are like the independent bookstores, wine shops, and ethnic eateries that enrich our lives. To support a specialty nursery is to support a small business. Your chances of locating an old cottage garden favorite that your grandmother or aunt once grew, or a rare Japanese maple you saw in a public garden are higher when shopping in specialty nurseries than on a foray in a big box store. Sequestered away for the moment, we can even browse a specialty nursery’s offerings online from the comfort of our homes. These nurseries offer mail order, and –in a matter of a few days to a week, you can receive your packaged orders at home. Opening these packages is as exciting as opening presents – what can be more thrilling than cutting the tape and unraveling the wrapping to uncover the plants? This simple pleasure of purchasing plants has been a longtime spring or fall ritual for gardeners; it will be a balm for our embattled spirits in these uncertain times.
Plants at Far Reaches Farm, Port Townsend, Washington State, wait to be shifted out for sales. The transition from a seedling to one ready for sale can be short or long depending on the individual plant —sometimes the price you pay does not account adequately for the time and resources to ‘finish’ the plants. For instance, species peonies take two years to germinate and another five to seven years to flower!
Like cooking at home, the urge to nurture and grow plants has never been stronger. It’s a shelter, a cocoon from the disquietude that rages around us an age of incompetent leaders and governments, and climate change. We gardeners already have been witnesses to the climatic changes that are altering bloom times, increasing disease and pest pressures, and bringing devastation in the form of floods or droughts. However, there are therapeutic moments in sowing seeds, weeding, planting, or simply reflecting upon the natural rhythms in our secret Edens. Self-quarantined or not, we still take comfort in the beauty of plants. Their beauty brings emotional benefits that outweigh those of other material goods like clothing. Just as a proud parent sheds tears at seeing their child graduate from college or marry, it’s hard to describe the pride and joy of watching a plant reach its full potential. Consider the purchase of a $15 plant from a specialty nursery and try to recall its inestimable value later. What was once a small clump of hope has increased tenfold into something from which we harvest flowers for our home or from which we pass cuttings onto other admirers as part of the tradition sharing plants that is at heart of gardening and at the center of the business of these specialty nurseries who are simply sharing what they love. Every day I like to observe and tend my modest terrace garden where the unexpectant arrival of a new peony or a cherished fig crop melts away my anxieties and everyday concerns. I am not done acquiring plants to try – I will be ordering a camellia from Camellia Forest Nursery, especially after its owner David Parks kindly recommended several in a recent email exchanges.
Epimediums from Karen Perkins’s Garden Visions Nursery.
Annuals and biennials from the Helen O’Connell’s Bunker Farm.
I encourage you, my readers, to support specialty nurseries when you can. They are the lifeblood of the horticultural diversity that make American gardens interesting and dynamic. With small businesses now on the brink of bankruptcies now, through our purchases we can parlay our passion for plants, uncommon and rare into an act of stewardship of the world around us that we cherish. Specialty nursery owners carry on their businesses with such fealty, motivated simply by their joy of plants. So buy that Siberian delphinium of an unbelievable caerulean blue you can only dream of in sapphires, or the daffodil whose wind-swept petals makes you blush at a memory of a school crush!
