I’ve been bad about visiting all these excellent (and not so excellent) local nurseries in the Portland area– mostly because I really don’t like to drive and Portland Nursery is about a block from my house. I spend a fortune there, and, to be honest, I don’t even particularly like the place. If it weren’t around the corner, I wouldn’t go there to pay their prices for marginal quality plants and more marginal service. Anyway, they are, and I do. C’est la vie.

This summer, though, I’d like to visit a bunch of the others to see if they’re worth the drive. One of my favorite sources for edibles is One Green World in Molalla, but that’s mostly mail order. I want to find some places that are pleasant to visit so I can spend my out-of-hand gardening budget somewhere that feels like they wouldn’t sell t-shirts and dish soap if there was more money in it.

A couple of days ago, I was having a lousy day at work and decided to head off to Cistus Nursery on Sauvie Island.

Odd coincidence: I didn’t know when I went that the nursery was actually previously owned by Parker Sanderson, R.I.P., who, as it turns out, was my wife’s roommate in college at Davis. Small world, eh?

Anyway, I packed up my notebook, recorder, and camera and decided I would document my visit for this very blog and its four readers. You are welcome.

Driving away from the house, I realized the recorder had dead batteries. By the time I decided to take a picture I saw I’d forgotten to put the film chip in the camera. Finally, while I walked around the place, I couldn’t come up with a single thing to actually write in my notebook.

So, this is what I thought of Cistus Nursery as I recall: it’s real nice.

For some reason, I expected it to be much larger than it is. The retail area is actually pretty small– a fraction of a place like Portland Nursery. Still, the plant selection is a lot more interesting. Where Portland Nursery will have 57 kinds of azalea, 35 kinds of roses, and has no problem offering English ivy, buddleia, and vinca for sale, Cistus appears to make a real effort to carry a much smaller collection of much more interesting stuff. Their sort of “mainstream” plants (e.g., echinacea, salvias) covered a couple of tables in the middle, and even they were just a little more interesting– if only because there were fewer, better choices.

Not to continue to pick on Portland Nursery, but any of the big places tend to have some pretty pathetic looking stock. I didn’t see any of that at Cistus. Everything looked well tended. Clearly, they’re not churning through rafts of annual 6-packs and so seem to pay more attention to the quality of their individual plants.

They apparently focus on Mediterranean climate plants, but they had quite a range of material. They had some really nice natives for reasonable prices (I don’t quite understand why natives seem to be the most expensive plants in a lot of nurseries). I ended up buying a twinberry (Lonicera involucrata) from that area.

I also picked up a Chinese Blue Vine (Holboellia coriacea) to run up a trellis where my last Cherry Laurel used to stand. Lastly, I’d been looking for a Chilean Jasmine (Mandevilla laxa), and it turned out they carried them. Saved me a trip out to Molalla.

All in all, Cistus is a nice place to go to actually look at plants. That is, there’s no apple festival, little in the way of accessories, and there aren’t acres and acres to wander. There are nice, unique, healthy plants in a manageable area. The people that I deal with with knowledgeable and pleasant.

On the downside, I suppose, it also strikes me as a place you’d only go if you already had a good idea of what you wanted. It’s a long drive to make just to wander through their relatively small (albeit interesting) retail area.

Still, by the time you graduate to a nursery like Cistus, you’ve probably learned that you really should know what you want before you go anyway. Impulse buying at the nursery, without at least a good idea of where your new specimen is going to live, often ends up with the wrong thing planted in the wrong place.

Cistus is the kind of nursery that you go to after you’ve had your fill of that “big-box” feeling, and you want to talk to some real plant people and buy some grown-up plants.