Dale and Bek's Excellent Adventure Series pt.2
Joy Creek is a nursery that proves you can have your cake and eat it too. This nursery is filled with trusted, reliable garden staples as well as exiting new things to try out. This was very apparent in their beautiful show garden where you can find bodacious rhodies, sprawling boxwoods and ethereal clouds of Choisya occupying the same space as exotic plants. For the plant pictured below, we both had to squint and hem and haw while brainstorming what it could be, eventually realizing that it was a Vestia foetida! Oh my, I really want one now!
Color Play Rhodies
Rheum palmatum
It's a Hebe folks!
Halimium
Dasylirion with old bloom stalk
Euphorbia griffithii 'Fireglow'
Clouds of blooming Choisya
Allium
Joy Creek has a wide selection of Clematis for sale as well as a Clematis testing area in the far reaches of the display garden.
Emerging Clematis
Clematis Deborah Dahl
Clematis Asao
Throughout the nursery, you can find small rock gardens displayed. A good reminder that you don’t need a lot of space to create something beautiful! Click here to see a video of Anna Kullgren of Optic Verve Design on Garden Time explain how she creates these mini gardens.
After our leisurely stroll through Joy Creek, we decided to head up the road for a hike in some of our local wilderness. In the hills above Scappoose, there is a retreat center that has worked diligently to create and maintain a piece of wilderness with beautiful trails and a healthy forest understory. There is nothing quite so inspiring as seeing plants thriving in their native habitat.
We journeyed from this natural habitat haven to Cistus nursery, a place that tests the limits of what can be grown in Oregon. We love Cistus, it always bends the mind of what one can do in a garden.
The first stop is the Big Top, I could spend hours in here! You can find all kinds of hard-to-acquire plants, some of which are a little tender. After touring the retail area and the surrounding gardens, we asked for permission to head up to the fairly new rock garden that is part of Sean and Preston’s private garden.
For a rock garden lover, this is a treasure trove of ohhs and ahhs! We even saw a small Agave parviflora sending up a flower spike getting ready to bloom!
Very inspiring! A visit to Cistus always leaves me wondering what else I could try growing in my own garden!
Oregon landscape business license: #6111