As a gardener, it is rare that I visit a nursery I don’t like. But frequently, I enjoy different nurseries for different things – one for their perennials, one for their conifers, one for their trees and shrubs, another for their interesting selection of containers and pots, and so forth. Mendons Nursery in Paradise (http://www.mendonsnursery.com/) is one of those nurseries that I find fully satisfying straight across the board. It is a nursery for hands-on, dirty finger-nailed gardeners: it is not too fancy in its main shop where a warm wood-stove greets winter shoppers looking over seeds and soil prep products; it is refined and relaxing in its home and garden gift shop, the Winding Vine; but most importantly, Mendons’ extensive selection of plants rivals that of any nursery, anywhere. Photo above, John and Jerry Mendon in front of one of Jerry’s favorites - a large Sago palm at the nursery.

Jerry Mendon started Mendon’s Nursery in 1973. He, his wife Joanne and their children had relocated to the Northstate from Southern California a few years earlier with the intention of Jerry retiring. Since 1948 Jerry had been working hard in the nursery and plant industry in Southern California, primarily working on big commercial landscaping, specializing in setting large palm trees. In that phase of his career he was responsible for setting such notable palms as the ones at Dodger Stadium and Los Angeles International Airport’s Tower. Jerry’s father had been a banker by trade, but an avid gardener at home, and it is to him that Jerry attributes his gardening gene.

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John Whittlesey is the founder and owner of Canyon Creek Nursery (www.canyoncreeknursery.com) outside of Oroville. John grew up outside of Sacramento and was drawn to plants and gardening from an early age. In his early adulthood, he worked at a mail order nursery in Spokane, Washington. Between 1984 and 1985, John and his wife, Susan, bought their 10-acre property outside of Oroville in a rural canyon dominated by native Oaks and grassland plants. After a plant-buying trip to England, where they purchased some of the hardy geranium, salvia and euphorbia plants that would form their base stock, they started Canyon Creek Nursery and their life in the Northstate. Photo at left: John and family dog, Rigel, at Canyon Creek Nursery. His other constant companion, the mobile phone, can be seen in his shirt pocket.

In the twenty-three years since, John - and his entire family in some way or another - have been providing “quality plants of uncommon perennials” to gardeners all over the world through what quickly became a top-notch mail-order business. The nursery is known for interesting and often heirloom selections of violets, dianthus (also known as pinks), geraniums (true and pelargoniums), abutilons (also known as Flowering Maples), salvias, agastaches, euphorbias and many, many others. Photo below and right: Abutilon nabob blooming in the greenhouse.

John is deservedly proud of the fact that theirs is a family owned and operated nursery in a day and age where small independent nurseries are up against the likes of Lowes and Home Depot, Monrovia and Proven Selections agribusiness-nurseries. Susan, a kindergarten teacher, is also a botanical illustrator and her sketches of plants and animals around the nursery have graced the pages of the all of the Canyon Creek Nursery catalogues. John has named some of his own plant introductions after his two children – son Reid and daughter Elicia. (Elicia’s middle name is Wren and wren illustrations are often included in Susan’s illustrations.) John’s mother, who is in her late eighties, still helps to take cuttings for plant propagation several days a week.

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Ken Chase is the owner and founder of Lifescapes, a full-service landscape company based in Chico, and working throughout Butte, Tehama and Glenn Counties. (www.lifescapes.us). Ken’s family has a background in rice farming around the Colusa and Woodland area and his wife Becky’s family was in the nursery business in Chico. Ken’s first paid residential landscape design job came in 1973 when his father-in-law saw Jim and Anna Mae Normoyle working in the front yard of their Butte Creek Country Club house. He stopped and said: you should hire my son-in-law Ken to help you out here. And they did. That very first design involved Twisted Japanese Black Pine and some beautiful large rocks in a serene arrangement.

Lifescapes, the company Ken Chase started from that first garden, has now grown into a well-established and well-respected award-winning design, build and maintenance company with 50 employees. The name in part refers to Ken’s strong belief in goodness perpetuating goodness and therefore in doing things thoughtfully and carefully – including (and in order of his personal priorities) being a husband and father, being a business owner with responsibilities to his employees as well as customers, and providing beautiful landscapes for people’s lives. Chase sees all of these facets: family, home, work, and environment as being critical to a person’s overall “Lifescape,” and thus the name of the business. Although Ken has worked on almost every kind of landscape you can think of – from a monumental fountain in front of a casino to planting three small trees in a suburban front yard - his “love of creativity – of proportion and scale and of mimicking the natural world” he observes while backpacking, hiking and fishing, often leads him back to interesting conifers – such as that early Twisted Japanese Black Pine.

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Roses are without question one of the most iconic, storied, loved - and sometimes hated - flowers of the garden. Roses grow with tremendous success in the Northstate and rose societies in the state date back to the early 1900s. The Butte Rose Society, which meets at the Chico Branch of the Butte County Public Library at 7:00 pm the last Tuesday of the month January – May and August – November, was founded in the 1994 as a joint effort of Mendons Nursery and one of its employees, Joseph O’Neill. The current President, Bill Reynolds, joined the society in the mid-1990s. Angela Handy, the current First-Vice President, joined shortly thereafter. The society is made up of just-under 100 total memberships and at any given meeting about half of those plus a handful of guests might be present.

Bill Reynolds, (on right in photo to right) the current president (who has been president before), is a life-long lover of roses. His maternal grandfather, a German-born avid rose-grower from the Gridley area, got Bill started by middle-school or earlier. The garden he shares with his wife Patricia (also a member of the BRS) boasts nearly 1200 rose plants. “It’s the amazing diversity of color, fragrance, habit, and size that gets me about roses,” he says. With a background in education and home-care, Bill is a naturally enthusiastic and patient teacher of rose care.

Angela Handy, (on left in photo to left) the current First-Vice President (who has also been president before), is a professional plant propagator and Nursery Manager for Chico Propagators. She, an ebullient, funny and expansive personality, is another self admitted rose-addict who came to loving roses through hating one. As a young adult at her family’s farmhouse out in almond-growing-country, she was forced to park near a “ratty-old monster rose,” which clawed her one too many times and she axed it to the ground. She’s not sure why her father handed her the axe without question, but after such a violent pruning, that rose bush grew into a beauty. A rose lover was born.

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It’s only March and I’ve already had my first bout of poison oak - all up and down both forearms. I think I came into contact with it from a pile of chipped mulch. It’s always torture to have, but for me, who is prone to it, it’s something of a rite of passage as well, marking the transition from the dormant to the active gardening months.

In my garden, exciting things are happening at a still-slow but now noticeable rate: Scent seems to be a hallmark of early spring bloomers, no doubt a skill developed to attract pollinators even in the face of what are often wet and windy conditions this time of year. My early daffodils, Naricussus x odorus ‘Campernelle,’ Narcissus ‘Erlicheer,’ and Narcissus ‘Early Pearl’ are all out in full, see photo at upper left. They withstood the recent heavy rains pretty well – only a few gave up and put their heads down in the muddy mulch. The heavy lemony-sweet scent of Daphne odora in bloom can be caught by my back door. I have the variegated variety, marginata, and even after the bloom is over – by mid-March or so – the white-edged leaves help to lighten this semi-shaded corner. Around the Valley, the early-blooming fruit and almond blossoms are beginning to pop, and the deciduous magnolia varieties are unfurling their delicious and elegant flowers, see photo at right.

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