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something different in an alstroemeria

The Alstromeria isabellana that I brought home from Far Reaches Farm in Port Townsend, Washington, opened its first bloom in my garden in Southern California a couple days ago. Sean Hogan had pointed it out to me in a display garden at his wonderful nursery Cistus on Sauvie Island outside Portland, Oregon.

From the [...]

bringing it home

Visiting first-rate plant nurseries necessarily involves purchasing plants, or so I’ve always believed — even if the purchaser is thousands of miles from home and has to shove the pots into an already bursting suitcase and then into the cramped overhead compartment of an airplane. Even if the nursery offers the sensible alternative of mail [...]

Cistus Nursery

The second installment of my recent visit to Oregon and Washington (or How I Mispronounced Botanical Latin for Six Days While Touring Gardens and Nurseries of the Pacific Northwest). My own peculiar zonal filter can’t help but color these posts; for example, I did feel a special affinity for our next destination, Sean Hogan’s nursery [...]

summer 2012 road trip: Pacific Northwest

I find vacations in the Pacific Northwest have a lot in common with Chinese food; after being home for a few days, you’re hungry for another serving of Puget Sound, please. I’m sitting at a table in my garden in Southern California, staring up at a piercingly blue sky, like a child’s crayon drawing of [...]

Chasing Plants

Post-Internet I’ve noticed plant desire has turned into a thinner and weaker strain now that it’s so easily satisfied. The really big desire, the kind that used to build up unrequited for years and years, is as analog as a manual typewriter. So now when a plant proves to be unobtainable, it’s kind of thrilling [...]

Sean Hogan at Flora Grubb Gardens

On Sunday, July 17, 2011, Sean Hogan of Cistus Nursery, Portland, Oregon, gave a talk at Flora Grubb Gardens in San Francisco, California, entitled “The Art of the Rosette.” I’ve visited Cistus Nursery twice, so I know first-hand that it’s every inch a horticultural destination, in the same league as such legendary West Coast [...]

Sudden Mediterranean Plant Collapse Disorder

I made that name up. But it’s true, collapse and then a swift death does come suddenly to mediterranean plants in lusty health mid-summer.

Which is why I’m ecstatic that this one cutting of Coronilla valentina subsp. glauca ‘Variegata’ has rooted. Emergency cuttings were taken just before it collapsed in a dessicated heap a couple [...]