Our Hortlandia 2026 Spring Fling...

When my friend Gerhard made plans to come up for the annual HPSO Hortlandia plant sale this spring I figured it would be a great excuse to plan a couple garden visits. Then Max (of this garden) said he was thinking of coming up. From there it snowballed and I ended up planning a "Hortlandia Spring Fling" over four days, April 2nd to the 5th...

Over the four days (depending on the day, time, and location) the group expanded and/or contracted from just the three of us (myself, Gerhard and Max) to include thirteen other fabulous plant people, including: Ann Amato, David Neumaier, Judith and Darren (friends of Max), Steven Garcia, Jerry Weiland, Marcia Donahue, Caleb Melchior, Ernie and Marietta O’Byrne, Jeffrey Bale, Riz Reyes, and Jason Chen. 

In addition to attending the epic plant sale that is Hortlandia, we visited four nurseries: Xera Plants (where I photographed that container above with the Selaginella), Little Prince of Oregon (wholesale, not open to the public), Blooming Junction, and Cistus Nursery. Here's the group at Little Prince, from left to right: Mike Hicks (Production Manager at LPO) Gerhard, Ann, and Max. Little Prince was our second stop of the long weekend, we kicked things off at Xera.

Even though it was only April 2nd, the Gunnera at Little Prince were already up and starting to look fierce.

The bulk of our time (and mileage) was spent touring local gardens. We saw ten total: James Andrew Gould, Dairy Creek Meadows, McMenamins Cornelius Pass Roadhouse, Jeffrey Bale, Bella Madrona, Kuzma/Halme, Hogan/Pew, my garden, Heather Tucker, and Felony Flats. Here are a few photos to give you an idea of what we saw...

Friday morning we started at James Andrew Gould's garden. Left to right here are: James, Gerhard, David and Max. I appreciate David wearing blue to coordinate with Portland's obnoxiously bright recycling containers which were curbside that morning.

James has a couple spectacular Echium that are fixing to bloom this spring.

And a freaky cool Arisaema sikokianum already in bloom.

Next stop, Dairy Creek Meadows, where there were Trillium blooming.

When I started asking around about the possibility of bringing a group of (mostly Bay Area) gardeners to tour Portland gardens at the beginning of April, I was pretty sure I'd hear NO. But you know what, not one person said no, even though it was really early in our gardening year (yes those Californian's said more than once that it still felt like winter at times, even though our weather was rather spectacular over the weekend). Here's the group in the meadow garden at Dairy Creek, which was largely still sleeping. Of course there were plenty of other things to see out there.

Marcia Donahue beads along with mossy, ferny goodness.

After a leisurely walk around Dairy Creek, we stopped at Blooming Junction nursery where I couldn't help but photograph the agaves in their display garden. I think this is an Agave parryi, joined by the chartreuse bracts of a Euphorbia wulfenii.

Their epic row of Agave ovatifolia 'Frosty Blue', showing no signs of blooming (thank god).

And another Agave parryi, I believe.

Lunch that afternoon was at McMenamins Cornelius Pass Roadhouse, it was near where Hortlandia took place and there was a garden to walk after we ate (not that I remembered to take many photos).

I'll share any photos I took at Hortlandia (not many) in my next post, when I document my weekend's plant haul, so now we're skipping right to Saturday morning when we visited Jeffrey Bale's garden. Jeffrey is a mosaic artist, this work at the bottom of the steps up to his home are his own eyes, watching, reproduced in rock.

While in Jeffrey's garden these amazing garden icons kindly posed for a photo, left to right: Marcia Donahue, Marietta and Ernie O’Byrne, and Jeffrey Bale.

Max and Jerry, with Jeffrey's bananas (Musa basjoo) in the background.

A detail from Jeffrey's garden (I'll share more in a future post).

After finishing up at Jeffrey's we headed down to Bella Madrona where I got in some pug lovin. Caper and Olive were there to great us.

They're both getting up there in years so they stayed inside while we wandered the garden with Geof Beasley. I used the bathroom in the house and snapped this shot of them keeping an eye on things through the screen door.

Out in the garden... (the weather was amazing!)

Caleb, Jerry, Geof and Max.

Next stop, the Kuzma/Halme garden. John and Kathleen were out of town, but kindly let us stop and walk the garden anyway. The winter covers I recently wrote about were all taken down and the plants were basking in the warm sunshine.

I wanted to hug the tree ferns, they were so fuzzy.

We ended Saturday out on Sauvie Island at Cistus Nursery and Rancho Cistus, the garden of Sean Hogan and Preston Pew.

I was pretty exhausted by then so spent quite awhile sitting and soaking up the view of their crevice garden.

On Sunday morning some of the gang showed up at my garden, where we had a casual walkabout, or make that a lay about if you're Jerry (thanks to Jason, aka @grevillea01 for sharing this photo with me).

After my garden we then headed over to Heather's garden, which was looking spiky-fantastic!

Gerhard said he'd seen this bent spike thing on other tissue cultured agaves.

The front garden view, facing the opposite direction.

The final stop on our Hortlandia Weekend Spring Fling was at Felony Flats Botanical Garden, belonging to Eric Peterson and Robert Brigham. Everyone was suitably impressed by Eric's labor of love, the amazing conservatory/greenhouse.

In case you're wondering the big agave from the Epic Agave Rescue didn't make it. But the smaller one lives on, that's it in the container.

So that's the weekend! It was a lot and many wonderful memories were made. A big thank you to everyone who opened their garden for the group. Plant people are the best! I'll definitely have future posts sharing more of the great gardens we toured, and yes, on Friday I'll share the plant haul.

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