Finally I’m posting about our recent trip down to Little Prince of Oregon which happened back on March 18th.  This post will end up being similar to Danger Garden’s post on the same trip, but hey, at least you’ll know that neither of us is making it up.

Little Prince is a wholesale nursery that supplies plants to a lot of retailers around the area, including pretty much every New Seasons store and my local Ace Hardware up on Woodstock.  Their plants are always great quality and well-grown – it was a real treat to see the production greenhouses in action as well as the impeccably clean shipping area.

There are a total of 70 high tunnel greenhouses.  Yes, I went into every single one of them.

The shipping area:

I encountered so many wonderful little fields of plants.  My attraction to masses of plants really drove home the importance of planting things in drifts.  Lewisia:

Some of the greenhouses are heated, like this one which contains plants that aren’t hardy (or at least, aren’t reliably hardy) in the northwest.  Like these Dicksonia antarctica.

I ended up with one.

I wandered into one house with a bunch of stock plants and just about DIED when I saw what amounted to a field of Drimys lanceolata, which I’m sort of obsessed with.  OMG this plant makes me happy.

In the end I caved to impulse on a number of things, but the boot of this old BMW has never looked better:

I set them all out on the ground when I got home and then realized I have this lovely three-tiered plant stand right next to my front door that has nothing but junk on it and why don’t I display these colorful new plants there for a while until I figure out where to put them?

 

A list of what I got, left to right, top to bottom in the above photo:

1. Schefflera delavayi
2. Tradescantia ‘Sweet Kate’
3. Bletilla ochracea ‘Chinese Butterfly’ – a light yellow flower
4. Grevillea ‘Ivanhoe’ because this spot right here is a zone 9 area and he will get planted in the ground here
5. A really red Heuchera whose name I didn’t record
6. A really chartreuse Heuchera whose name I totally failed to record
7. Agaves.  wow I thought I did a better job of recording what I bought but I guess not…
8. Tradescantia andersoniana ‘Blushing Bride’ with its tricolor insanity.  Hard to see here but omg it’s awesome
9. Another of the same flaming red Heuchera
10. Polystichum setiferum – I got about four of these for Wichita Ave but then decided to keep this one
11. Couple ferns in there.  Hard to see but one is Cyrtomium fortunei and the other apparently I failed to record
12. Sempervivum ‘Borisii’ which I never would have bought had I not seen the mature plants in the Semp stock house.  I’ll give you a pic.
13. (under the red Heuchera leaf on the ground) Enyngium bougatii

Ok here’s why I got that little semp:

My garden is so young.. It’s kind of silly to be thinking about small plants like this when I really need to wait for trees to grow, but I cannot resist this intense level of cuteness.  I can’t wait until my plant looks this buttoney.  I’ll probably have to plant it into a container for a while, which I really don’t mind doing.

Aside from all the lovely plants, I must say the group of attendees to this event was really top-notch.  It was sublime to meet a number of fellow garden bloggers in person for the first time and I look forward to many more such forays!