John Whittlesey, Canyon Creek Nursery - Oroville
( If you are reading this anywhere but my blog, you can find the original post here. )
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.
On the late-winter, early-spring day of my visit to the nursery, the sun was shining and creatures were stirring after several long dark weeks of winter rains. The sweet scent of the winter-blooming bush honeysuckle (Lonicera fragrantissima), whose pale-yellow blossoms caught the rays of sunlight, perfumed the entrance to the main section of the nursery yard. John’s daughter, Elicia (about to go off to graduate school) was raking, tidying and organizing amongst the pots. John’s mother arrived to take cuttings from the garden stock. The nursery, a large square-ish yard on the floor of the little canyon, beside a year-round creek, beneath the sheltering oaks, was peaceful in its late winter spareness. The large assortment of plants in many, many black nursery pots stretching down the homey yard have that deceptively tatty last year’s-brown-dead-foliage appearance of late winter. On closer inspection, the old dead foliage and seed heads are hiding and protecting the plants’ new flush of green along the edges and crowns. Some small greenhouses for starts and potting-on and a rustic-looking wooden shed where orders are filled and plants packed for shipping punctuate the yard. The dirt drive comes through the woods and across a wooden bridge into the center of it all. Photo above left: The deep purple, fragrant and double, Parma violet ‘Marie Louise’.
As John and I stand talking, the first Mourning Cloak Butterfly either of us have spotted this year floats by among the plants. A hummingbird or two visits the end of the honeysuckle blooms and then seems to visit an old seedhead. “See that?” he says. “Don’t be too quick to cut back the garden in spring. The birds will use that old fluff from seed heads to line their nests.” The Whittlesey’s home looks down the wooded hillside to the Canyon Creek Nursery yard, see photo above right.
John is an expert horticulturist of international reputation, who has re-introduced selections of violets and abutilons thought to be extinct. He collaborates with other horticulturists of world reknown and supplies celebrity gardeners such as Tasha Tudor and Martha Stewart. And yet – like the nursery he has built – he is homey and welcoming. He is easy-going and perfectly happy to chat with me - an amateur but avid home gardener - about books, gardening trends, our children in our gardens, and plants that have waxed and waned in our affection. His demeanor understates by a lot his multiplicity of talents, and the remarkable diversity and quality of the plants in his nursery.
Canyon Creek Nursery’s plant selection has evolved and grown along with John’s own interests as a gardener. While he built the nursery on hard-to-find and heirloom selections, John has always been attracted to tough, resilient plants. Photo above left is one such plant, Euphorbia rigida, and photo below right, Teucrium polium, is another. In the last few years this interest has only grown along with his commitment to responsible, low-environmental-impact gardens and native or regionally appropriate plant choices. The nursery’s plant offerings are therefore now even more hardy, tough, disease and drought resistant and mostly native or appropriate to the Northstate’s Mediterranean climate. “I am most passionate now about helping to develop the local horticulture,” he says. “Regional culture and horticulture, regional native plant life and plant communities, helping people to change some gardening habits and learn to work with our region and its climate and resources – this is what I want to do.”
John currently serves as Horticultural Chair of the Mount Lassen Chapter of the California Native Plants Society (www.cnps.org/cnps/chapters), and regularly writes for the their newsletter The Pipevine (www.cnps.org/cnps/chapters/newsletters/pipevine.pdf). He is a frequent speaker for regional horticultural and garden organizations. Also, in the last decade, he 
graduated from and is now a now part-time instructor for the California School of Landscape Design (www.robertlittlepage.com/school/home.htm), outside of Auburn. A project he hopes to see through in the coming year is hosting a lawn make-over workshop on a local urban or suburban lawn, in order to demonstrate how easy it is to gently kill your high maintenance lawn and replace it with a low-impact and beautiful Mediterranean garden. If you have a lawn you’d like to donate, give him a call.
It is my firm belief that gardeners, the people who grow and plant and tend the landscape of any community, constitute one prism though which you can look and be able to judge the overall quality of that community. Here in the Northstate, knowledgeable, caring, creative and generous gardeners of both the professional and home-garden variety are legion. I feel confident in saying – without hyperbole - that John Whittlesey is certainly one representative of this legion’s top level.
People are welcome to come and shop the Canyon Creek Nusery, but should call first for an appointment. You can also find John and Canyon Creek Plants at the Chico Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings in summer.