About Us

We are a nursery specializing in the cultivation of herbaceous ornamental wildflowers, grasses, and select hybrids and cultivars. In creating our plant selection, particular attention is given to plants that are reliable – hardy, robust-growing, long-lived, and low-maintenance – while embodying a more natural or wild aesthetic.  It is the very same selection of plants we as designers use to practice the art of naturalistic planting design, a practice that, through trial and error, greatly informs our decision of which plants to carry.  Our sales approach is hands-on, and we go to great lengths to help customers understand the plants in our nursery from both an ecological and design perspective, which often includes a guided tour of the nursery’s display gardens.

We are keenly aware of the commercial plant industries’ continued effort to entice the public with an ever-increasing selection of plants.  Yet, in our opinion, many newly introduced hybrids and cultivars are redundant, no better than already existing, tried and true forms, and thus we carefully choose from these new introductions to help simplify the design process for ourselves and our customers.  Important professional trials for some of the more popular genera, native and non-native, can be found on the website of Mt. Cuba Center, as well as those of other botanical organizations.  Sometimes we ourselves select new cultivars for our nursery, the result of the genetic diversity found in the seeds we sow and discoveries we make.  In the website catalog, a plant description with the phrase “A local selection” means a plant has been propagated from locally found stock.

Naturalistic Planting Design

Because nature is constantly changing from day to day, season to season, our interest is not only that a plant looks natural, but that it reflects this change while remaining beautiful, known as having a “long season of interest”, and thereby helping to keep our gardens attractive from spring into winter.  And the quality of a plant that best fits this criterion is its structure, or plant architecture, which has as much to do with a plant’s overall appearance as with the shape of its inflorescence or flower head – spike, button, globe, plume, daisy, umbel, etc. –  and the persistence of both over time, whereby it ends the gardening season as an equally ornamental skeleton and seedhead.  In contrast, flowers and their colors are much more ephemeral, with very few perennial plants blooming all season long.  Thus, from a design perspective, structure provides the backbone of a garden, and color can be seen as a beautiful and emotional enhancement to this structure.

Naturalistic planting design is an aesthetic grounded in the natural world, and inspiration is found as much in the spontaneous beauty of natural areas as in designed gardens.  Along with the use of natural-looking plants with a long season of interest, the way that they are used further distinguishes this design approach from others, laid out not only in blocks and swathes but also intermingled.  And with a much greater use of grasses, such plantings may evoke the beauty of a natural grassland, such as a meadow or prairie.  No matter the source of inspiration or the style, gardening is always a living, participatory process that entails the gardener having both artistic vision and a basic understanding of the sciences of ecology, biology, and botany, making it wholly unique as an art form.  Complete artistic expression is still not yet achieved until all those creatures that flutter and buzz, creep and crawl, find refuge in the plantings we create not only for us, but for them.  As both gardeners and nature lovers, our goal is to inspire and encourage imagination in the art of garden and planting design, with particular attention given to the dynamic beauty and emotion of nature.

Display/Demonstration Gardens

Campo di Fiori and its display gardens are a showcase for the natural beauty of plants and a place of ongoing experimentation in designing with them.

Perennial Meadow

Traveling past the sales area and through the white pine hedge is the largest display garden, known as the Perennial Meadow. Here is the greatest diversity of plants with strong and long-lasting structures artistically juxtaposed in an informal, open-border, meadow-like planting.  The heavy clay loam supports large clumps of Calamagrostis, Filipendula, Eupatorium, Panicum, Veronicastrum, and Vernonia, which rise above a semi-matrix of Sesleria intermingled with clumps of Sedum, Geranium, Allium, Liatris, Echinacea, Persicaria, Penstemon, Scutelleria, Zizia, and several others.  This garden is at its height of visual interest from mid-summer into late fall. A stone path runs through the center of the meadow, allowing one to immerse oneself amongst the plants and animal life, to experience the planting more intimately and from different angles.

Deschampsia/Calamagrotis Meadow

This garden is located in and around the lower nursery area and parking lot and is a minimalistic matrix-type planting largely dominated by the grasses Deschampsia ‘Bronzeschlier’, a native cultivar, and Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’.  Both have a very long season of interest and thus can be used in large masses effectively. From these emerge a minority of forbs such as Camassia ‘Caerulea’ in the spring and Rudbeckia maxima and Digitalis ferruginea in mid to late summer.

Carex Woodland Meadow

This garden is located in the upper nursery area and is another example of a matrix-type planting.  Under the semi-shade of a giant red oak tree, in well-drained silt loam soil, we are challenged to make a shade garden adapted to our increasingly dry summers, and that has the structural qualities that help it to remain attractive through the seasons.  Here, Carex muskingumensis, an ornamental sedge native to the Great Lakes region, is the primary matrix plant, creating a woodland meadow-like feel.  Growing within the matrix of Carex are Geranium maculatum ‘Alba’, Smilicina racemosa, Blephilia hirsuta, Hosta ‘Krossa Regal, Anemone ‘Robustissima’, and the statuesque ornamental grass Spodiopogon sibiricus, among others.  A stone sitting area in the middle of this planting overlooks the fields that foreground the Cathance River wetland.

Nature Walk

For those interested in nature study or just wanting to take a walk, a mown path provides an opportunity to explore the fields and edges of the designated conservation land surrounding the nursery and the Cathance River.  Bluebirds, bobolinks, tree and barn swallows, and bald eagles are often seen utilizing and nesting in or around the fields.  From here, the adventurous may make their way onto the abandoned railroad bed and walk along and through the middle of the wetland and riparian areas adjoining the river, where a whole other mix of plant and animal species can be found.