NEWSLETTER: Three Weekends, Three Plant Sales!

Greetings from Sequim! This is not really meant as a comprehensive update on our doings, but we wanted to provide a quick note to inform you of the opportunities you will have to come and find us in three regional plant sales we will be participating in, during this very busy month of April. Please keep in mind that we welcome your special requests if there are any plants we can bring to any of these sales!

This weekend, you can find us at the Bloedel Reserve Premier Plant Sale and Open House. Not only will all the best nurseries of the Olympic/Kitsap Peninsulas represented (as well as some farther afield), but there will be a rare plant auction, numerous lectures, and the chance to see the Reserve and its gardens for free. The dedicated Bloedel folks are putting out so much publicity about this, it is certain to be huge! I should mention that, since this sale has been very good for all involved, the participating nurseries here tend to bring a LOT of stock, including all the coolest and rarest treasures! For more information see http://www.bloedelreserve.org/event-calendar/premier-plant-sale

Then, the following weekend, we will be in Portland for Hortlandia on April 13 – 14. This sale is probably now the biggest and best in the Northwest. With over 100 (!) nurseries present it is well worth the drive from the Seattle area. In fact, in our first year of participation in this sale last year, I met people from as far away as Bellingham, Boise and Sacramento who came to this sale because they thought it was the best one, period! And I would agree – it’s a whole expo hall full of plants! And if you’re in Portland, well, you’re just lucky to have this event in your home town. Let us know what you want, and we’ll bring it! http://www.hardyplantsociety.org/hortlandia

Finally, on April 19 – 20, we will be in Federal Way for the Rhododendron Species Foundation Sale. This would be a great chance for those of you in the South Sound area to come and say hi or pick up certain plants you might be wanting. There are lots of other great vendors here as well in what we think is an excellent combination that cannot usually be found in one place at any of the other sales. http://rhodygarden.org/cms/2013-spring-plant-sale/

This weekend I will be giving a talk during the Bloedel Reserve sale; it is on Sunday at 1 pm and will be about Southern Hemisphere plants. I will attempt to sort out which are hardy and which are not. Since I have killed so many of them I feel well qualified to talk about this! Bring your questions, and I’ll bring lots of cool plants!

Then when that’s over, we can get back to our usual spring frenzy of potting up stuff as fast as possible and never leaving the nursery – ha ha.

Thanks for reading! If you can’t make it to any of these events, you’ll hear from us again in May some time before our first open house of the year, at the end of the month. Until then,

Ian & Co.
The Desert Northwest

And one slight addendum if you will. Those of you with an interest in Heronswood and current happenings there will want to be aware of an event this Saturday being hosted by the Port Gamble S’Klallam Foundation. Their description of the event is as follows.

Heronswood: Past, Present and Future
Saturday, April 6th from 12:30 p.m. to 3 p.m.

The Port Gamble S’Klallam Foundation has announced a multi-media presentation by plantsman Dan Hinkley, together with Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribal Chair, Jeromy Sullivan. Hinkley, one of the co-founders of Heronswood, will talk about the past and what’s happening currently to restore the gardens that are treasured by so many people around the world. Sullivan will talk about plans for the future, including the formation of a steering committee and some exciting garden events happening this year.

Before the presentation, visitors will be able to experience a performance by the S’Klallam Singers. Coffee, tea and pastries will be available. There’s a suggested donation of $5 per person, which will benefit the garden fund.

This event will be held at the House of Knowledge Longhouse on the Port Gamble S’Klallam Reservation, 31964 Little Boston Road NE, Kingston, WA 98346.

NEWSLETTER: September open house!

Dear Friends,

Well, it looks like summer has decided to show up after all! It always does, though; even if we only get three weeks of it. Late summer is my favorite time of the year, when everything turns brown and crispy outside, and you know we are just a couple short months away from our first major arctic blast. (Did I really just say that?) All those poor, sad hydrangeas and red maples are looking really stressed by now if they are not on irrigation. How sad. We really feel bad for them, but not bad enough to try to convince people to replace them with something more appropriate.

To celebrate this exciting season we are hosting our second open house ever here at the nursery on September 1 – 3! You can visit this site for directions. Why should you come to this one if you were just here? Well, certain plants that were not really ready to sell at the time of the previous open house have now filled out and are looking good. We also expect the both weather and traffic to be improved this time around.

If that isn’t enough to get you excited to come out here, I will be offering a presentation here at the nursery! I will be discussing plants native to the Southwest that do well in the Pacific Northwest. The presentation will be at 5:00 pm on Saturday, September 1st and it’s free! I will show you a variety of exciting ornamental plants that are cold-hardy and great for beating the drought. Some of them will be available for you to purchase and add to your garden right away.

Speaking of planting stuff, would you believe that the plants we put out in early September 2011 are looking great now? That’s right, we think September is a great time to plant. Of course the slogan “fall is for planting” has been around for a while, but we didn’t really get what the fuss was about until we moved here, and away from heavy clay soil where spring planting seemed to work pretty well. Yeah, you have to water for a few weeks, but during that time the plants are putting out lots of roots and will reward you with excellent growth in the spring! Especially if you mulch them.

Early September is also a great time for an open house because our selection reaches its peak about this time of the year! So even if we are a little behind on potting things up, there are still plenty of exciting plants to choose from. And this would be the place to mention that we have updated the specimen plant list since July with a lot more cool stuff! Finally, as always, if you can’t make it to the open house, you can always come and visit by appointment!

Speaking of plant lists, the mail-order list is still pretty up to date, and the sooner you get your order in, the sooner you can get planting! We have a few more things in the pipeline to add later this fall, which we will announce.

We must also mention that we will be trying a new plant sale this September, hosted by the Salem Hardy Plant Society on September 15. So if you’re in Oregon you have another chance to get in your special requests from us! This is our first time doing this sale, but we got invited so thought we would give it a try! Please come out if you can and help make it a success. We will also be at the NHS sale that same weekend, but with a more limited selection of plants than in past years.

Now you’re up to date on all the latest news from the Sequim desert. Thanks for reading!

Ian & Co.
The Desert Northwest
PO Box 3475
Sequim, WA 98382
mail@desertnorthwest.com
http://www.desertnorthwest.com

NEWSLETTER – June 2012 – First ever OPEN HOUSE and more!

Dear Friends,

Greetings from Sequim! Where did spring go?? More on that later. First, we have some exciting announcements!

You will not want to miss our first ever AWESOME OPEN HOUSE! What’s that? We’re really going to be open? That’s right. For one weekend, on July 20 – 22, we will be open for business and you can come out and see our amazing collection of cool and unique plants! Also, if you’re a certifiable plant geek, you may be interested in our Plant Geek Convergence on the 21st. For more information on both, and of course the all-important directions for how to get here, please see http://www.desertnorthwest.com/openhouse.html We look forward to seeing you at what is certain to be a unique plant shopping experience!

Next, and almost as exciting, we have finally updated the mail-order list again. This has been in the works for a long time, but required a major edit on our part as I wanted to go through all the plant descriptions to make sure they were accurate and up to date (and to redo some formatting), as well as add a new feature, Drought Resistance Codes. So it was supposed to be the spring 2012 list, and now it has ended up being the summer 2012 list – but hey, it all worked out! And it is very much current, even including stuff that has just become ready in the last few weeks. The Drought Resistance Codes are something we hope to continue to work on. So people won’t be totally lost we have posted a small essay to introduce the concept, which you can view at http://www.desertnorthwest.com/catalog/terms.html and scroll to the bottom of the page.

The new list, of course, contains many exciting new plants! (http://www.desertnorthwest.com/catalog/) Of particular interest will be our recent Penstemon collections; these are the perfect drought tolerant perennials for the Northwest garden (unless you live in a swamp or a dark forest, like Shrek). You will find a number of new selections on our list including the spectacular P. barrettiae, a rare endemic of the Columbia Gorge area that features glaucous-bluish leaves and tight clusters of light purple flowers! Then we have Grevillea australis, which is perhaps the hardiest Grevillea, or close to it anyway; and has (surprisingly) fragrant flowers: it does not get enormous and is perfect for smaller spaces. And Kageneckia oblonga is an interesting shrub or small tree from Chile in the Rosaceae family, that ought to be fun to try: so far the plants remind me very much of Vauqelinia (Arizona Rosewood) or Lyonothamnus (Catalina Ironwood), to which it must be closely related.

Also noteworthy from the list; Embothrium coccineum, the stunning Chilean Fire-Tree, is back after a many-year abesnce; as is Fuchsia procumbens. We also offer one of our Ceanothus prostratus collections (a particularly nice one, too!), a plant that is not easy to find; an evergreen Mediterranean oak that I haven’t seen here but it ought to do well (Q. faginea subsp. alpestris); an easy-care tree Aloe (A. plicatilis), the groundcover Gunnera magellanica, and several new conifers including the ever-popular Araucaria araucana (monkey puzzle tree). All of the new plants are noted on the list, but we still like to suggest looking carefully at the whole list,, as certain “returning” plants we have not offered in many years are not noted as new.

So, what else is new? Winter wasn’t bad, making me wish I had planted more stuff out in the ground last fall. We got snowed on for a few days totaling 9” but the ice missed us completely. June weather has been a drag (as I type, rain is pouring down – yes, even in Sequim) but April and May were about dead-on average which felt nice after last year. Even so, our spring seemed to get sucked away on various projects and we are now massively behind on potting up plants. Hopefully we can do some serious catching up over the next couple months now that we have about finished our third greenhouse. That has been a major time-consumer and I think I have learned my lesson to never again build a greenhouse in the spring when I have so much to keep on top of with the plants!

We (or in some cases, just I) enjoyed seeing you at the plant sales in which we have participated this spring; including the Bloedel Reserve sale, Hortlandia, the Rhododendron Species Foundation sale, and of course the Sequim Garden Show. Our next such event is the Fronderosa Frolic which is coming up the second week in August in Gold Bar, so if you can’t make it to the open house we will be glad to bring any plants you would like for pick-up there. If you can’t wait that long, we will also be present at Dragonfly Farms Nursery in Kingston on the weekend of July 14 – 15 with a selection of plants to sell (we thank Heidi for this opportunity!); again, special requests are welcome for that too.

Thanks for reading and for your continued interest in our nursery! May your garden live long and prosper. And please come and see us at the open house!

Ian and Company
The Desert Northwest
PO Box 3475
Sequim, WA 98382
mail@desertnorthwest.com
http://www.desertnorthwest.com

THE DESERT NORTHWEST NEWSLETTER – August 2011

Ed. note: Following is our first email newsletter in years, but hopefully not the last. Enjoy!

Dear Friends,
Greetings from Sequim, Washington, where we are pleased to announce the sun is out once again and for the last week or so it has finally started to feel like a normal summer. As I look back I note that our previous newsletter dates back to – wait for it – October 2007! That’s right, when things still looked rosy, before the economic meltdown really set in. Now that things aren’t so rosy anymore, we hope that people will be increasingly interested in saving water and reducing garden maintenance, and therefore interested in our plants which (for the most part) require little of either once established.

With such a long hiatus from e-mail newsletters, some of you may be wondering if we have gone out of business, or if your attempt to sign up for the newsletter was unsuccessful, or what. You may have even forgotten you signed up! But in any case, we’re still here, and at long last we’re finally organized enough to make this happen again. I know it’s not exactly a spectacular example of effective e-mail marketing from a business standpoint, but at least we are not guilty of spamming your inbox with at least two or three “newsletters” a week as is another certain mail-order nursery which shall remain unnamed. In theory we’d like to aim for about four to six newsletters per year. Due to the long break, this newsletter will necessarily be the longest one we have ever sent. Think of it as a “chapter” in the story of the Desert Northwest.

We would like (before rambling enough to completely lose your attention) to draw your attention to our largest EVER inventory of mail-order plants, which can be viewed at http://www.desertnorthwest.com/catalog
Now the only problem is that we provide only a simple list of plant names: we have not managed to keep up with our enticing descriptions. We hope this shall soon be remedied, but don’t wait for it. (And hey, at least we have kept the list current for the last couple seasons, which is more than we can say for certain periods in the past.) In the meantime, you can find out how cool these plants are by plugging the names into a Google search and/or Google image search. Between Google and Wikipedia you can probably find out a lot more about some of these plants than I could tell you anyways (although that won’t stop me from trying in the future!). I know, it’s not quite the same, but it’s something to do on those days when you just need to geek out with some plants.

Highlights of the mail-order list include our best selection of Arctostaphylos (manzanita) in years, including an outstanding local form of A. x media with grey-green leaves and pink stems. We also have four collections of Banksia marginata now, three of which are new to us. This is certainly one of the most promising Banksias for Pacific Northwest gardens, as some specimens even in cold gardens remain alive after the last few cold winters. We also have B. integrifolia subp. monticola, a “mountain Banksia” of giant proportions never before offered in the US that we know of (except by us last year). We also have five species of Azara, fourteen(!) Callistemon selections, and fifteen of Grevillea (that may be our best ever, or close to it), and fifteen of Leptospermum including some very hardy species (the newly offered “spreading form” of L. lanigerum, shared with us by Mark and Lila Muller at Fairmeadow Nursery, endured 6 degrees F undamaged!) – each more beautiful than the next, of course. If you need any advice selecting the best ones for your site, just e-mail us and we would be glad to help. Our conifer selection has also expanded greatly, and don’t miss the Hebes which have now all been re-classified under Veronica for some reason.

We would also like to present our largest list ever of specimen plants (which is what we are calling plants in 1 gallon or larger sizes) for sale, which can be viewed at http://www.desertnorthwest.com/catalog/specimen_plants.html
These plants, available for local sale, look great now – so, hey, come and get ‘em! Just e-mail us for an appointment; we are happy to accommodate.

For those of you who are wondering about seeds, we are unfortunately suspending seed sales until later this winter when I will make a reassessment. (I know it doesn’t say that on the web site.) With the absence of any recent collecting trips, and the fact that some of the stuff we used to collect locally has frozen in the last few colder winters, you could say our seed sources have somewhat dried up. Stay tuned for more updates and if there are any particular items you are interested in you are welcome to inquire about availability.

So, to quickly recap what has happened since October 2007: in 2008 we moved the nursery from Poulsbo to Sequim and went through a difficult period of having very little time to take care of the nursery or build new greenhouses in Sequim. A proportion of our inventory and collections were lost in the December 2008 freeze, although we did manage to save a lot of stuff by moving it into the garage for a time! Since then we have been adding as much as we can to our facilities, having constructed a shade house and two large (20 x 84′) greenhouses (with only one layer of plastic, I have been using them more as cold frames so far). So we have certainly kept busy. This year I feel like things are really coming together better than ever before, and I suppose that relates to our impressive (for the scale of our operation) inventory of healthy plants. If you’re interested in a closer look at the nursery development process, go to our blog at http://desertnw.wordpress.com/ and start clicking back at ‘Older Entries’ to see the documentation of greenhouse construction and other exciting stuff.

Some may be wondering how we feel about the “lousy” weather we have been experiencing over the last couple years. Mostly I have been too busy working on the nursery (among other responsibilities) to have time to complain. I will say that a cool spring actually makes things easier in some ways – if plant growth is slowed down a bit by cool weather then I’m under less pressure to pot up those plants that don’t sell right away, before they become rootbound and leggy. I then have all summer to catch up which actually works out quite well. The other thing to bear in mind is that no matter how cool and dark it gets around here, we can never manage a truly “wet” Northwest summer. Unless you live in a swamp, sooner or later your soil dries out, and if your garden is thirsty then you’re watering, even if only for a short period for some years. Thus we continue to believe that what we are doing remains relevant and beneficial. We would also note that one of our coolest summers in history, 1957, was followed immediately by an exceptionally long and hot one in 1958. Anything can happen!

A couple other quick notes before I wrap this up. I mentioned the blog – I have been posting more regularly there about a variety of topics that you may find interesting if you have a professional interest in horticulture. Another way we are staying in touch is through Facebook or “the evil empire” as we sometimes call it. We have been posting brief updates there once or twice per week as well as the most current photos of the nursery. If you are on Facebook please consider going to https://www.facebook.com/TheDesertNorthwest and …(cough)… “liking” our page.

Finally, since I know you’re looking for something to do next weekend that doesn’t involve hanging out with people who don’t care about plants, we would like to invite you to the 2011 Fronderosa Frolic, which will be held at Fancy Fronds Nursery in Gold Bar (for more information see http://www.fancyfronds.com/frolic.cfm). We will be there along with all the most exciting Northwest nurseries with all the coolest plants, including some of our favorites such as Fairmeadow Nursery, Steamboat Island Nursery, Cistus Nursery, Far Reaches Farm , Dancing Oaks Nursery, and more! And you should come and buy some ferns from Judith at Fancy Fronds who is truly one of the coolest and most gracious nursery people around. If there are any special requests we can bring for you just let us know and we will bring them – we hope to see you there!

Thanks for reading and may your plants and gardens continue to prosper whatever life brings!
Spinosissimusly,
Ian & Co.
The Desert Northwest
http://www.desertnorthwest.com
mail@desertnorthwest.com
PO Box 3475, Sequim, WA 98382

Newsletter October 14, 2007: time to shop for plants!!!

Hello friends,

Well six weeks into the fall shipping season, which has been busy enough to keep me on my toes despite only limited announcement, I find a chance to sit down a type a quick update of what’s new here at the Desert Northwest. We’ve gone from a busy summer to an even busier fall, as we endeavor to pack up all the plants, pots and other supplies and move them to our new location over the coming weeks, while still performing the usual tasks to take care of them, doing thousands of cuttings for next year’s plants, and building new greenhouses before winter. So 2007 will go down as “the year that was completely crazy” in my memory. Unfortunately (and probably needless to say) the thing I probably won’t be able to make time for is any major collecting trips. New Agave and Yucca seeds will have to wait one more year, I’m afraid, barring a miracle.

I am finally organized enough to send out newsletters via e-mail to everyone who requested to be added to the list of e-mail updates on my order form! So this will be the first such newsletter. If this message has reached you in error or you wish to be removed from my list, please accept my apology and send me a note back indicating this is so.

While the Eastern US has been enjoying unseasonably summer-like weather, it has been downright wintry out here, with lots of rain, wind, and significant mountain snows. Summer was rather cool and clammy, but not too out of the ordinary when one looks at the statistics – but I can hardly remember such “bad” late September and early October weather. After enduring 28 consecutive days of below normal temperatures, our average high of 63 (anticipated tomorrow) seems downright balmy. The record highs seem impossible to believe! Did it really get to 83 on this date in 1991? Oh yeah, it’s not winter yet. Well, on the plus side, I haven’t had to do very much watering.

As the rains come early to the Pacific Northwest, we are reminded that fall is considered the ideal time for planting by “normal” horticulture professionals and specialists alike. Giving plants a little extra time now to put down roots will give them a significant edge come spring, and with the weather we have had, you can plant right away without worrying about irrigating them. Of course, a little frost protection may be necessary to overwinter certain plants successfully, depending on your climate.

My biggest sellers continue to be the Grevilleas: not surprisingly, as these plants have so many virtues; and, I believe, are on the verge of making it big in the Pacific Northwest. Many of them are good performers in the South as well. It doesn’t say this on the web site, but I have under-produced them so get yours quick before it’s too late! This fall I am doing hundreds of Grevillea cuttings to hopefully meet next year’s demand. Don’t forget the South African Proteas – I have quite a few of these now growing large enough to ship and they are frequently even showier.

I have an increasingly diverse selection of offerings for the cold-hardy desert garden. A better selection of hardy cacti and Agaves is the obvious addition, but no exotic garden should be without my special hardy Furcraea selections: these Yucca impostors are among the most rewarding and impressive deserty type plants we can grow, and they also blend nicely into any tropical themed garden.

To make your desert garden really authentic you might also consider adding plants such as an evergreen oak or one of my manzanita selections, both of which complement any cactus garden splendidly. These tough and durable plants also stand very well in their own plantings and are excellent for covering dry sunny banks or areas difficult to reach with the hose, for gardeners trying to get away from the same old stuff. Consider the rugged yet easily grown Arctostaphylos hookeri, or one of my super-grey A. viscida selections.

For the admirers of antipodean flora, I now offer an expanded selection of New Zealand and South American native plants. Some of these will be available only sporadically so get them while you can! Finally, for those of you who have been asking for Callistemons, I now have a splendid selection of hardy species and forms from which to choose, with flower colors ranging from cream to red to purple.

Thanks for making it another successful year. Successful enough, at least, for the nursery to continue forth, and for the likelihood of an even more exciting plant selection to come. Hopefully I’ll send out one more newsletter before the end of the shipping season with some commentary on my plans for the exciting new nursery location. Stay tuned!

Ian Barclay

The Desert Northwest

Web: www.desertnorthwest.com

E-mail: deus_vobiscum@hotmail.com

Current Availability: Click Here

June 2007 Newsletter: Yes, I’m still alive

Well as I look forward to a cool rainy first day of summer tomorrow, I must reflect upon the events of the last couple months that have had me a bit distracted from running a nursery.  While this is not usually a forum to discuss events of my personal life, it’s hard to explain where I have been without doing so!  So, long story short, the nursery has been on the back burner because I have been busy planning a wedding.  My wedding and now my lovely wife and I are married and embarking on our new life together.  Now, unfortunately, our time is still tied up by tedious paperwork of a most displeasing nature, which I don’t really wish to discuss here.

All this to say, it’s easy to explain why the spring mail order season ended on a rather anti-climactic note.  While plants will not be available mail order again until September, the nursery will continue to be open by appointment throughout the summer.  Hopefully I will change the web site to announce this before people think I have dropped off the face of the earth.  Many species have just grown large enough to sell mail order now that the season is over, and many more will do so by the end of summer including lots of exciting things I have not offered before.  On the other hand, I am so far behind on potting up little plants it is not even funny.  Oh well, I will get to them when I get to them!

As for the long term future of the nursery, we plan to continue forth and keep growing and selling plants as time allows.  And we can hope that time will allow for more, but this summer and fall are likely to continue to be hectic.

Also as time has slipped away from me, I still haven’t gotten the e-mail newsletter thing together – maybe by this fall.  If you want some cool stuff, don’t hesitate to get in touch!  I will be around and as summer goes on I will have many more plants than are listed on the website.

Newsletter 3/19/07 – The Spring Shipping Season Begins!

Is it March 15 yet? OK, so I was a few days behind in updating the web page. But with my new job, and my car in the shop for some major work, it has been kind of hectic lately and I deserve a little break! Or at least, that is what I shall tell myself, LOL.

So now, the exciting news is, I am all ready to sell and ship plants for the spring 2007 mail order season! The list is up to date and I have added 10 new plants so far. I am excited to offer two species of Puya! This genus of fabulous xeric terrestrial bromeliads (some of them gigantic) has been on my radar screen for a long time, and deserves much wider testing in gardens. I also have two nice Eryngiums, which I consider to be very rewarding because they look like they should need good drainage, but they do not: they are tough as nails and will grow about anywhere. I am also pleased to offer one Eucryphia (another is on the way), a beautiful, showy ornamental broadleaf evergreen. And you will find a couple of new New Zealand plants and a few other things.

Admittedly, a few plants had to disappear from the list, as I either sold out of them, they outgrew their pots (mostly eucalypts), or they froze (note to self: don’t leave Fuchsias out in tiny pots through 13 degrees. They are only hardy once established). But on the plus side, I should be able to add many more plants throughout the spring shipping season, more than making up for any losses.

Speaking of frozen plants, winter seems to finally be over and it’s time to assess my losses. It is a darn good thing I finished that second greenhouse just before winter, and was able to heat it throughout the winter, or the Desert Northwest might be no more! After a dip to 13 degrees F in November and 19 degrees F in January, with some high temperatures below freezing both times, and multiple snowfalls, it is no surprise that the Banksia serrata and Acacia retinodes I planted outside at the nursery last fall are quite dead. More disappointing is the death of Yucca whipplei, Fremontodendron x ‘California Glory’, Ozothamnus rosmarinifolius, Eucalyptus bicostata, E. delegatensis var. tasmaniensis, and E. approximans. Oh well, all plants have their limits somewhere, and the nursery is far from being in a sheltered microclimate. In some cases, the importance of starting with larger plants and cold hardy provenances has been noted. On the plus side, Grevillea lavandulacea ‘Penola’, Pittosporum ralphii, and Callistemon ‘Woodlanders Hardy’ all survived, which is impressive.

But fortunately spring is on the way, and the number of new plants propagated will soon far outweigh any losses. A quick trip to California was fun, and resulted in me returning with several Passiflora, Metrosideros umbellata, Acacia pravissima ‘Golden Carpet’ and others, that I shall use for stock plants (and the aforementioned car problems, LOL). I’ll have to keep looking for replacements for some of the Grevilleas I have killed in the past – I’d like to have another go at G. x gaudichaudii, G. victoriae ‘East Gippsland’ and G. acanthifolia. I passed by UC Berkeley this time, but enjoyed my usual visit to the garden formerly known as Strybing, UCSC, and a few nurseries. I also visited the botanic gardens at Tilden Regional Preserve for the first time: a fabulous collection of California native plants with more manzanitas and dudleyas than you would believe. I highly recommend it!

A couple photos of Acacia pravissima ‘Golden Carpet’ at UCSC to make you get mad at me for not having it for sale. Now tell me, what kind of person wouldn’t want a plant like that in their yard?

Newsletter 1/14/07 – New year, new web site, new features!

Well as I sit here in a coffee shop in downtown Poulsbo watching the Seahawks lose (not that I really care – does the winning team get to take our land? steal our women? No….so what does it matter?), I have finally finished uploading the new version of my web page! You will notice lots of new features, the most exciting of which is probably the Plants and Gardens Gallery, featuring about 160 photos of desert plants growing in the Pacific Northwest. I have been working on this off and on for months and I am very pleased to finally have it done! Now everyone can see what a wide variety of desert plants can potentially be grown here, and I think this will help to generate more interest in the web site, the nursery, and gardening with xeric plants in general. Other new features include this blog, which you have obviously found if you are reading this; a page where I can post articles about plants and other relevant topics, A Plant Photo of the Month, and lots of new Links. (This page includes some links to other nurseries – some of them have helped me out, so why not return the favor?) Also, I have finally added a gallery of Plants of Peru to the web site, another project I have wanted to finish for a long time.

So, why spend so much time on the web site when I could be outdoors working on the nursery? Well, for one thing, everything is frozen solid so there actually isn’t a lot to do at the nursery for once, except make sure the greenhouse heaters have enough kerosene to keep running. In creating the new site I had a number of goals: first, to be able to continue to use the site for plant sales; second, to make the site visually appealing and unique, which I hope I have achieved with my cute pictures; and third, to provide a resource that will provide information and stimulate interest in the use and appreciation of xeric plants in general. Fourth, and most importantly, I needed a site that would be easy to update frequently while remaining simple to navigate. The format of the last site wasn’t bad, but it would have become awkward if I had wanted to add a lot more content. Now I think I have something to work with: I can easily add more articles, galleries and links as needed. The newletter will be easy to type up and post quickly, and I can also use this blog to post pictures and other interesting tidbits. And the plant catalog has been divided into various sections, to which more offerings can be added, even though each category has only a small number of offerings now.

With the cold weather we are experiencing, some of you may be interested in the weather articles found here. Many times now I have heard “if this is supposed to be an El Niño winter, why is it so cold?” Besides pointing out that this winter is in reality about average to slightly below for the Pacific Northwest (as of this writing anyways!), I hope the articles will help to inform you about this subject!

Your comments about the new site are, of course, very welcome! I would appreciate it if you report any broken links, or errors grammatical or otherwise.

Of course, I haven’t neglected to continue selling seeds and plants – Winter is the time that I collect a lot of fresh Eucalyptus and Callistemon seed, so look for an update on that soon! The plants are all huddled together in the greenhouse, waiting for the warmth of spring. I seem to be keeping most of them alive, so I should have lots of exciting offerings for the spring shipping season, which begins March 15th.

Happy New Year and may all your plants recover vigorously from this rather wild winter.