The Road to Yerba Buena Nursery

I was recently on the prowl for unique nurs­eries in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia. When I visit fam­ily, in this case my brother Scott, I coerce them to search out des­ti­na­tion nurs­eries for me. This time we drove about 30 miles to Yerba Buena Nurs­ery in Wood­side, which is a wooded hill­side com­mu­nity out­side of Palo Alto. Beau­ti­ful views up there, twisty roads, lovely homes, winer­ies. As we were dri­ving up the hill (after our excel­lent ham­burg­ers with fried onions at Bucks in town) I found myself won­der­ing why this nurs­ery is sit­u­ated in such a remote spot. Turns out it was started by Gerda Isen­berg on her family’s 3000 acre cat­tle ranch in 1960. Located on 40 acres, this is the old­est nurs­ery in Cal­i­for­nia ded­i­cated to native plants and ferns. In addi­tion to car­ry­ing 600 dif­fer­ent species of natives, the prop­erty includes a 2.5 acre demon­stra­tion gar­den encom­pass­ing micro­cli­mates, a pond and demon­stra­tion gar­dens. I loved the fact that for every eng­lish gar­den plant we shouldn’t plant in our drought stricken state, there is native plant could be sub­sti­tuted. Their web­site is well designed, with lists of plants avail­able and a lot of infor­ma­tion for the gar­dener. This is our North­ern Cal­i­for­nia ver­sion of the Theodore Payne Foun­da­tion, a great Socal Native nursery.

www​.Yerbabue​na​nurs​ery​.com.

The “office” at Yerba Buena