Plant shopping in Portland

-
After hearing wonderful reports about Portland area nurseries, I made a quick trip down to see for myself. As you can see, it was a successful trip!
Cistus Nursery's fall sale had just started, and I came home with a Crinodendron hookeranium, Fascicularia bicolor ssp. bicolor (later returned for 'Spinner's form'), Metapanax delavayi, Chamaedorea microspadix, as well as a few others. After leaving Cistus, I went to Pomariua where I found a Schefflera delavayi beginning to show beautiful leaf serration, fingers crossed the lobes become even more dramatic with age.

View at a traffic light between Cistus and Pomarius

At Pomarius, I found this beautiful Edgeworthia chrysantha 'Nanjing Gold,' which was way too big to fit in the car. After showing a photo to Paul, we decided to rent a minivan and drive back to Portland the next weekend to buy it.
Topiary bear cub at Pomarius
Portland nurseries lived up to the hype; I look forward to my next trip.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Summer in the garden

-
Image
I will head up to Vancouver BC next weekend for the Hardy Plant Study Weekend. We've been busy in the garden continuing to push the crazy plant person theme. Here's a quick shot of the front garden. My husband is a recent palm tree convert and drove down to Raintree Tropical to buy more expensive compost, specifically a second Butia eriospatha and a Brahea armata (he is not deterred by common sense). He did raise up the palm trees to improve drainage but good luck. The first Butia eriospatha did sail through last winter. Here's the new, much larger Butia. It barely fit in the car. Ignore the other plants in the photo, the mushroom-shaped maples are living on borrowed time. We are only just starting to tackle the back garden; there is a slope behind the Butia that I would like to rework into a hardy xeriscape. And lastly the Brahea. Rock crevices will all be planted with hardy cactus and succulents, and I'm thinking of an oversized Sempervivum or a spiral aloe in the big
Read more

Bromeliad propagation

-
Image
Just before leaving for Denver last week to attend the Garden Bloggers Fling, I was in the process of finalizing an order for some hard to find bromeliad species. My visit to the San Antonio Botanical Garden last December inspired the purchase; I admired the garden's display of epiphytic bromeliads growing on tree branches, small pitchers connected by a dramatic network of long stolons. Below are the new arrivals from Michael's Bromeliads, all arrived neatly wrapped in newspaper with handwritten labels. If the offsets/pups look undersized, they should; most are mini Neoregelia species with a couple of small Aechmeas, plus an Acanthostachys for fun. Apologies for the terrible lighting. This was the bromeliad I most wanted but seemed impossible to find in the US, Neoregelia pendula var. brevifolia. Acanthostachys strobileacea arrived already in bloom, or perhaps fruit? While bromeliads are monocarpic, an unbloomed offset was also attached, so the bloom was not a cause f
Read more

Palm shopping

-
Image
I haven't posted in a few years. Who knew that a toddler and a newborn would be a lot of work? We have been pushing a bunch of plants into the ground the last few weeks to get ready for spring.  A couple of weeks ago my husband of all people found a treasure trove of cool palms being sold through a local enthusiast in Renton. We came home with three Trachycarpus princeps, a big waggie, and a very small Sabal texensis. We put one of the princeps in a prominent spot by our front door.  It's in a cage for protection from the rabid palm & mondo grass eating bunnies. I don't know if the design idea will work but the vision is for it to eventually stick up through our Fargesia demissa 'Gerry' that is spreading through the bed (right of image, not shown). We have an outdoor seating area nearby and the idea of drinking a cup of coffee and looking up at the white undersides of the princeps leaves (ten plus years from now?!?!) will hopefully be worth the wait.  The three
Read more