Saturday, August 29 is the date to mark on your calendar for the Garden Conservancy Portland Open Day. In conjunction with the Hardy Plant Society of Oregon, the Garden Conservancy will be opening five private gardens in the Beaverton area to ticket holders. You can find out more information here and at the end of this post. I got to… Read more →
“I’d like to visit the swamp.” My parents thought this an odd request when I visited my home state of Minnesota last week, but I’d recently learned that I’d grown up literally next door to one of the most unique plant communities in the world, and I had never appreciated it. So I set out to rediscover the peat bogs of… Read more →
I visited a special garden last month. Dragonfly Hollow, the garden of Vanessa Gardner Nagel in Vancouver, Washington, is the garden of a professional garden designer, art lover, and author. She literally wrote the book on garden design, and her newest book is on garden furnishings. I knew her garden (23 years in the making) would be a treat, but… Read more →
The nursery industry is big business in Oregon, but most members of the general public will never get to see what goes on behind their gates. Many of the nurseries in the Willamette Valley are huge wholesale operations that sell their plants all across the country, but they don’t sell to the public. My old buddy Don Blocker, who reps for the… Read more →
For some, it was too much gorgeousness to take in. Visitors seemed dazed, and could be heard muttering, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” If you took their reactions out of context, you might have thought they’d been in a car wreck and were in a state of shock. But I forged on, exploring Old Germantown Gardens—the incredible, almost two-acre garden that… Read more →
Yesterday I had the great fortune to visit J. Frank Schmidt & Son Nursery on a personal tour led by none other than the fabulous Nancy Buley, Communications Director at JFS. If you’re not familiar with J. Frank Schmidt, umm, it’s one of the largest and most respected wholesale nurseries in the country. They sell bareroot, B&B, and potted trees to garden… Read more →
