Joy Creek's Five Plantsfor the More Experienced

Along with writer Kym Pokorny's recent Nursery Destinations: Joy Creek piece in The Oregonian was a series of sidebars. The one titled Joy Creek's Five Plants for the More Experienced listed the following plant suggestions for gardeners:

1. Lobelia tupa, an unusual lobelia with spiky, tropical-looking felted foliage. Purple-tinged stems soar to 6 feet and are crowned with a spike of warm red flowers.

2. Hydrangea serrata 'Miyama Yae-murasaki,' a Japanese lacecap hydrangea with fully double sterile florets that seem to float above the hill of fertile florets. Blooms start out pink or lavender but turn red along with foliage by late summer.

3. Clematis recta 'Purpurea,' purple-foliaged herbaceous clematis with sweetly scented white flowers. Cut back after first bloom for a repeat of fresh purple foliage and bloom. Needs a bit of support from companion shrubs or a single stake and some garden twine.

4. Zauschneria 'Bowman's Hybrid,' an upright form with silver-gray foliage and bright orange flowers. "Brings in color late in the season," Smith says. A tough plant that will adapt to heavier garden soils.

5. Brunnera macrophylla 'Jack Frost,' the best shade plant there is. "Everything a forget-me-not ought to be," says Smith.

Image: Sidebar from The Oregonian

© 2007 Joy Creek Nursery

2007 Classes and Celebrations:Bird Watching and Attracting Wildlife to the Garden - April 29

Joy Creek Nursery offers customers educational classes, workshops and special events throughout the gardening season. Classes are conducted in the outdoor classroom in our gardens, 18 miles north of Portland at 20300 NW Watson Rd in Scappoose. Please follow the signs to our workshop parking when arriving at the nursery.

All Sunday classes begin at 1:00 p.m. and are free to the public except unless otherwise noted.

April 29
9:00 a.m. - Bird Watching - Lee Cain
Because of our gardens and our country setting, Joy Creek Nursery has been blessed with an exceptional diversity of birds. Meet at 9:00 a.m. in the nursery parking lot for an hour-and-a-half of guided bird watching. Be sure to bring your binoculars!

Lee Cain lives, works and plays in Astoria , Oregon, with his wife and two kids. A former fisheries biologist, he now teaches Aquatic Biology and Integrated Science at Astoria High School . When he is not studying and teaching about things wet and scaly, he often has his binoculars on and is chasing birds with his kids.

1:00 p.m. - Attracting Wildlife to the Garden - Nadine Black
Get design and plant ideas to make your garden more welcoming to our fellow creatures. Also, learn some steps to take to insure a safe environment for them.

Nadine Black tried on many hats in our industry - from private gardener to wholesale plant sales - before she discovered that her real passion was helping retail customers create gardens. At Joy Creek Nursery, she has found a new set of hats, managing retail sales, conducting on-site garden consultations, and teaching workshops. In addition, she has acquired the Lifetime Certified Oregon Nursery Professional certificate from the Oregon Association of Nurseries.

© 2007 Joy Creek Nursery

Photo: Joy Creek Photo Archive © all rights reserved

Joy Creek's Five Easy Plants

Along with writer Kym Pokorny's recent Nursery Destinations: Joy Creek piece in The Oregonian was a series of sidebars. The one titled Joy Creek's Five Easy Plants listed the following plant suggestions for gardeners:

1. Echinacea purpurea, in all its forms. The only way to kill this plant is perhaps give it too much water. (The Joy Creek website lists 'Magnus,' 'Ruby Star,' and 'White Swan.')

2. Sarcococca ruscifolia, glossy evergreen with super-fragrant white flowers. "People have the belief that from the end of October to March nothing is going on in the garden," says Mike Smith. This plant, blooming in February, proves that's not true.

3. Helleborus x hybridus, a perennial with the power to wow in winter. (Numerous options are listed on the Joy Creek website)

4. Clematis 'Polish Spirit,' a large clematis with red-purple flowers that increases rapidly and is very generous of bloom from June to October. Give it some room.

5. Fuchsia 'Old Fashioned,' a hardy fuchsia with carmine sepals and lavender corollas. Once established, it needs water only three to four times a year and "blooms its silly head off," says Maurice Horn.

Image: Sidebar from The Oregonian

© 2007 Joy Creek Nursery

2007 Classes and Celebrations: Bamboo - Sunday, April 22

Joy Creek Nursery offers customers educational classes, workshops and special events throughout the gardening season. Classes are conducted in the outdoor classroom in our gardens, 18 miles north of Portland at 20300 NW Watson Rd in Scappoose. Please follow the signs to our workshop parking when arriving at the nursery.

All Sunday classes begin at 1:00 p.m. and are free to the public except unless otherwise noted.

April 22 - Bamboo

If you have been afraid to grow bamboo, Dain Sansome's class is for you. Learn about the characteristics and growth habits of various bamboos, how to control their spread and how to maintain them as screens or groves.

Dain Sansome is a licensed landscape contractor. His business Bamboo Valley Authority specializes in bamboo removal, maintenance and installation. Born in Minnesota, he learned about both gardening and bamboo at an early age. His subsequent travels lead him to Japan where he studied and traveled extensively. In 2002, he came to Oregon to grow bamboo in a favorable climate. He has worked at The Bamboo Garden, one of America's largest and oldest bamboo nurseries, since 2003.

© 2007 Joy Creek Nursery

Photo: Joy Creek Photo Archive © all rights reserved

Renovating tired lawns with gravel

Last week, in the Homes & Gardens of the Northwest section of The Oregonian, writer Kym Pokorny featured Joy Creek Nursery in the article Nursery Destinations: Joy Creek. In another article in the same issue, Advice for a Rock-Solid Lawn, Pokorny also highlighted the nursery's use of gravel on a lawn to open the soil and allow roots to grown deeper.

The recipe for doing so was included as a sidebar to the feature. Here it is:

BASIC RECIPE

Best done in April-May or September-October

1. Mow grass short.

2. Spread one inch of 1/4-10 crushed gravel (don't use anything smaller, as it compacts and turns into concrete) over the entire surface. Work into grass and level it out.

3. Spread 1 inch of compost mulch over entire surface, working into grass and leveling. Usually a fair amount of gravel will show through.

4. Top-seed lawn and rake into mulch.

5. Top-fertilize with an organic fertilizer.

6. Water. Repeat watering as needed to keep surface moist until grass seed sprouts.

7. Mow when needed in approximately two to four weeks.

NOTES

The basic recipe can be applied once or twice a year to correct the surface of the lawn.

The recipe can be changed to less than or more than an inch, depending on how rough the surface of the lawn.

The deeper the gravel and mulch, the more grass seed you'll need to replace existing grass that can't grow through the thicker gravel layers.

You can kill the lawn completely before the basic recipe is applied. This works especially well to kill off undesirable vegetation.

If you decide you need to kill, till 6-8 inches deep. Then add 2 inches 1/4-10 and 2 inches of compost. Rake out, roll lightly to compress air out of soil (this is the only time you'll need a roller). Seed and top-dress with chopped grass straw (available at Hobbs & Hopkins Ltd., 503-239-7518).

At Joy Creek, we use Pro-Time grass seed, also available at Hobbs & Hopkins.

Source: Joy Creek Nursery

Image: Article from The Oregonian

© 2007 Joy Creek Nursery

2007 Classes and Celebrations: Trees in the Garden - Sunday, April 15

Joy Creek Nursery offers customers educational classes, workshops and special events throughout the gardening season. Classes are conducted in the outdoor classroom in our gardens, 18 miles north of Portland at 20300 NW Watson Rd in Scappoose. Please follow the signs to our workshop parking when arriving at the nursery.

All Sunday classes begin at 1:00 p.m. and are free to the public except unless otherwise noted.

April 15 - Trees in the Garden

We often think we don't have room for more trees in our gardens. Anne Marsh will introduce gardeners to many small to medium-sized trees that can easily be added to beautiful effect.

Anne Marsh is a landscape designer in the Portland area. Together with her partner Gary Fear she owns Marsh & Fear Garden Solutions specializing in designs for residential gardens. Anne is eager to pass on some basic tenets of design that home gardeners can apply to their own gardens.

© 2007 Joy Creek Nursery

Photo: Joy Creek Photo Archive © all rights reserved

Nursery Destinations: Joy Creek

Today, in the Homes & Gardens of the Northwest section of The Oregonian, writer Kym Pokorny featured Joy Creek Nursery in the article Two gardeners in search of perennials found their niche. The piece features a history of the nursery operation, a listing of some our upcoming classes, and some great photos of our plant offerings. Plant images featured include Ribes x gordonianum, Pulstilla vulgaris and Clematis 'Constance.'

Pokorny also included items about Joy Creek's Five Easy Plants, Five Plants for the More Experienced, and a listing of some of our 28 past plant introductions. Watch future Joy Creek Times entries for more information about those article sections - and our recipe for renovating tired lawns with gravel that she covered in another article in the weekly gardening section.

For more great gardening reading check out Pokorny's blog, Dig in with Kym.

Image: Article from The Oregonian

© 2007 Joy Creek Nursery

Our 15th year in business

This gardening season marks the anniversary of Joy Creek's fifteenth year in business. This is a perfect time for us to look back and reflect on where we started and to see if our original vision of the nursery remains vital.

We have gone through those years often as if we were on a roller-coaster (and only very rarely as if we were stranded in a stagnant lagoon). Everyone at the nursery has had to learn new roles as we have evolved from being a small mail-order nursery to adding a second department, our retail site, and then adding a third department, landscape design and installation services.

This evolution has come about mostly from listening to what our customers have requested. For example, we would never have started our retail store if local mail-order customers had not continued to drive out to shop in our growing areas. And we would never have started our design and installation services if customers had not asked us to design and create gardens for them.

Upon reflection, we think we can say that our vision of a green and growing world remains unchanged in many ways. For instance, one component of that vision was educating home gardeners. That commitment is evidenced in the ever-changing and expanding class list, as well as in all of the lectures and symposia we participate in throughout the United States. Another component of our vision was our desire to make interesting plants available to our customers. We hope that that commitment is obvious from the plant listing in our printed catalogue and on the Joy Creek website.

© 2007 Joy Creek Nursery
Photo: Joy Creek Photo Archive © all rights reserved

2007 Classes and Celebrations - Fertilizers and Soil Amendments - Sunday, April 8

Joy Creek Nursery offers customers educational classes, workshops and special events throughout the gardening season. Classes are conducted in the outdoor classroom in our gardens, 18 miles north of Portland at 20300 NW Watson Rd in Scappoose. Please follow the signs to our workshop parking when arriving at the nursery.

All Sunday classes begin at 1:00 p.m. and are free to the public except unless otherwise noted.

Fertilizers and Soil Amendments - Sunday, April 8

Patrick Petersen gives gardeners an in-depth look at how, when and why to use the many fertilizers and soil additives that are now available to gardeners.

Patrick Petersen received his degree from The Ohio State University in horticulture with a minor in entomology. After six years working as a nursery manager, he was hired as a horticulturist for Marion Ag. Services. His job is to educate customers how to use horticultural products. Patrick is interested in how the various elements of a garden - the soil, the bugs, the fertilizers, composts and plants - work together to create an ecosystem.

© 2007 Joy Creek Nursery

Photo: Joy Creek Photo Archive © all rights reserved

More Joy Creek Plant Introductions

One fact that many customers do not know about Joy Creek Nursery is that we are always finding new and interesting variations of plants in our gardens. Sometimes these prove to be of great interest and we test and evaluate them in hopes of finding a worthy new introduction. To date, we have released 27 plants and have several more in the evaluation stage.

As part of our Joy Creek Times, we thought we would reintroduce our plants a few of at a time and give a little of the history of their development. Penstemons were the very first plants we selected to introduce as our own.

Our collection of garden hybrid penstemon is one of the most popular at the nursery. These colorful plants bloom from the summer into the fall. Their tubular flowers range from white to pink, rose, red, blue and purple. Because they are evergreen shrublets, they are valuable additions to the mixed border.

In 1994, we discovered a seedling that was intermediary between two familiar cultivars, Penstemon ‘Midnight Blue’ and ‘Stapleford Gem.' It proved to be vigorous and free-flowering. The mid-sized, light purple blue flowers have dark maroon stripes in their throats which gave rise to the name ‘Purple Tiger’. We released it in 1996 along with another seedling we had discovered that had enormous lavender-purple flowers with dark raspberry streaks in their pure white throats. We called this one ‘Raspberry Flair.' (Photo at left above)

In the mid-1990’s, we began selecting seedlings that had pure white throats and tinted lips. The first in the series of selections was a lovely violet-lipped form, which we named ‘Violet Kissed’. This was joined by pale coral pink-lipped ‘Coral Kissed’ and bright rose-lipped ‘Cerise Kissed’. The following year we introduced ‘Wine Kissed’ (Photo at right above) which is the most dramatic of the four with its white throat and wine red lips. All have been popular with our customers. Recently the series was featured by the wholesale nursery, Sunny Border Nursery, as part of their temp-perennial collection.

The latest addition to our penstemon introductions almost ended up on the compost pile as we were rooting out stray seedlings. Fortunately, it was spared. ‘Raspberry Wine’ (Photo above) is a cross between ‘Raspberry Flair’ and ‘Wine Kissed.' The flowers are the largest we have seen on a garden penstemon. The depth of color is close to that of ‘Wine Kissed,' however, the throat is not white but streaked in raspberry very much like ‘Raspberry Flair.'

We are now at work on a series of new penstemon crosses and hope to be trialing our seedlings in the coming year.

© 2007 Joy Creek Nursery

Photos: Joy Creek Photo Archive © all rights reserved

Joy Creek Landscape Design Services

Many customers have asked if Joy Creek Nursery has a landscape department. The answer is "Yes!" We offer design and installation services, throughout the Portland metropolitan area, with expertise in soil preparation, planting, paths, patios/terraces, soil retention, drainage, lawns, irrigation, water features, lighting, walls, and renovations.

Our landscape designer John Caine brings out the individual garden vision from every gardener. Call the nursery at 503.543.7474 for an appointment.

Photo: Fisher/Cunningham garden renovation

© 2007 Joy Creek Nursery