>The Portland Japanese Garden was voted #1 of public gardens in the west in 2013So somebody thinks there's more going on there than Van Dusen, UBCBG, Seattle Botanical Gardens, San Francisco Botanical Garden, UC Berkeley, UC Davis...? Not to mention the other public Chinese/Japanese gardens on the west coast. In Portland you should go to the Hoyt Arboretum, the Portland Classical Chinese Garden, and Cistus Nursery - unless conifers are all there is for you. Except for the over-planted little conifer collection and the interest of the individual specimens it contains - until they all grow into one another - the Oregon Garden mostly looks like a big mall or motel landscape - and has pretty much no labeling, unless this has been corrected (when we asked at the information desk we were told nobody was keeping track of what things were, and given some whack reason for this approach having been taken). So much for the promise of a great new botanical garden for the west coast, where a comprehensive showcase of local nursery products was to be created. This post was edited by bboy on Mon, Mar 3, 14 at 21:28

Hi Lyn, thanks for your reply. I'm about sea level and south of you on the Nehalem River/Bay. Yes slugs are everywhere but not large enough to ploy my gardens! I grow mosly ornamentals, haven't had vegies in years, nor do I try to live off the land. Yet, I do have perennials to trade and would be willing to trade with anyone who would be interested. I am open to private emails to those who wish to share plants and/or photos.

Here's a style of conifer/rock gardening that I think very few other than Jerry Morris would be able to pull off. He's discovered and propagated numerous forms of western conifers, but he also appears to have collected rocks! These photos were taken in July 2010. This garden appears as a tapestry of conifers and rocks of various colors and textures. I think it works because the conifers are of similar scale and shape and so are the rocks, so nothing seems jarring in such a densly packed backyard. And the vignettes are very carefully and artistically composed. Mike is so right about looking at nature and especially at rock outcroppings for inspiration and direction in building a garden. However, the Jerry Morris garden seams to be inspired by rocks on the surface such as in fellfields, where nature appears more chaotic. But the elements of this garden are not so disjoint that I cannot imagine them co-existing, although in a less dense population.

As I believe I posted on this site at some point afterward when I went to a plant enthusiast talk presented by the Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle some years ago one of the speakers was Larry Stanley. And when he showed 'Blue Surprise' he quipped that "The surprise is when it dies". (Various other people from the garden center industry were in the audience so it may have spread from there. If Larry was the first one to start saying it). Nevertheless The Seattle Times later had an article about a conifer enthusiast in Shoreline that had one of some size as part of his display. Something like 10 ft. tall or more. It being a juvenile form failure in an open field in USDA 6 might not be unexpected. I brought it back from Britain around 1994 but never had the one small example installed here develop. A much more recent planting of a one gallon sized specimen in the back yard started to discolor last season, after being here maybe three years. However both this and the little guy from overseas were tried in locations heavily influenced by much larger trees.