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Farwest Trade Show Nursery Tours
August 20 -21

Recommended for Garden Centers, Landscape Architects, Contractors and Designers, Rewholesalers, Growers and Brokers.

Tour the Willamette Valley. Clustered within 25 miles of each other, several of the nurseries will give you a taste of a top industry trend: edibles! Big material, innovative use of plants, vast selection, and specialized service are hallmarks of these nurseries.

• Bountiful Farms Nursery Inc. – The nursery has grown to over 500 acres of nursery stock. The third generation of family is responsible for daily management and operation of the farm. Bountiful Farms in known for its signature collections of espaliered fruit, conifer and other ornamental plants; fanciful sculpted plants; topiaries; and a patio collection designed to provide privacy, shade and visual impact.
• Kraemer's Nursery Inc. – Kraemer's consists of six farms totaling more than 850 acres with 67 acres under cover and 42 loading dock spaces. The nursery grows a wide diversity of woody and ornamental flowering shrubs, broadleaf evergreens, grasses, perennials, conifers, roses, vines, small fruits, Japanese maples and deciduous trees. You'll see liners through #20 containers.
• TSW Nursery Sales Inc. – TSW is a grower and broker of quality nursery stock that works with over 250 growers in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California. They stock an abundant variety of material, everything from 4-inch liners to 4-inch caliper shade trees to 20 foot conifers. They hand-select all the plant material that they ship.
• Weeks Berry Nursery Inc. – Started back in 1888 as a small peach farm on the banks of the Willamette River, 100 years later Bradley Weeks is continuing five generations of farming. Whether you want to grow it on, in the field for commercial production or sell to the home gardener, you'll find many varieties of asparagus, blackberries, blueberries, currants, elderberries, gooseberries, grapes, herb and vegetable starts, raspberries and strawberries.

Recommended for Garden Centers, Landscape Architects, Contractors and Designers, Rewholesalers, Growers and Brokers.

This tour provides tremendous variety and a good taste of the diversity of Oregon's nursery industry. We'll start and end the tour with a focus on innovation—a cascade flood floor to energy saving, light diffusing greenhouse covering. In between, we'll see a diverse array of nursery material, including a nursery with operations in Oregon and California that takes advantage of the best of both locations and a nursery with its own tissue culture operation.

• Smith Gardens Inc. – Each year, Smith Gardens ships millions of bedding plants, baskets and perennials to Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska. They are driven by their passion for growing quality plants, including embracing new technologies—like their cascade flood floor—and improving operational processes.
• Simnitt Nursery – Simnitt Nursery has been growing quality nursery stock for more than 25 years. Owned and operated by two brothers, they grow more than 175 varieties of Rhododendrons as well as Daphne, Kalmia, Pieris, and grafted conifers among others. Prime Willamette Valley soils make their plants some of the highest quality stock available from tissue culture liners up to specimens.
• Van's Nursery of Oregon Inc. – Family-owned and operated, a wide variety of quality deciduous and evergreen shrubs, Japanese maples, conifers and deciduous trees are grown in containers. Owner Robert van Klaveren is a fifth-generation nurseryman. What he can't grow himself, he brokers in to provide customers with all their plant needs in the shortest amount of time.
• Adaptive Plastics – Offering a complete source of commercial and hobby greenhouse supplies, they manufacture Solexx™, a twin-wall paneling for commercial greenhouses. Every nursery is looking for ways to save money. Solexx paneling results in a quick ROI in energy savings and accelerated plant growth.

Recommended for Garden Centers and Greenhouse Growers.

Start with a visit to a mecca for urban gardeners: Garden Fever! Minutes from the Oregon Convention Center, this full service garden center has a small footprint but a big vision: Good plants, good tools, good dirt! Then it's on to exotic and unusual plants in a Spanish villa setting. Walk the fields of the country's largest dahlia grower and the display gardens of a renowned perennial breeder. You will wrap up the day at annual plant trials and displays.

• Al's Garden Center (wholesale greenhouse operation) – "Grown by Al's" appears on the vast majority of pots in Al's three retail garden center locations. Over 30 acres of growing operations produce more than 6 million plants each year. Family owned and operated by the second and third generation, Al's started as a fruit stand, began selling nursery stock in 1959 and then a few years later began growing seasonal bedding plants. Now a greenhouse is devoted each year in August to displaying the newest annual varieties.
• Fessler Nursery Co. – The family owned and operated nursery has grown to over 500,000 square feet of greenhouse space. It grows more than 70,000 baskets annually and offers a large variety of quality annuals that are shipped seasonally throughout the Willamette Valley and Southern Washington. In 2004, Fessler Nursery became a root-n-sell for Selecta, one of the leading breeders of annuals in the world, and now ships rooted cuttings across the country. Poinsettias are shipped locally during November and December. Florist azaleas are available as liners, budded or blooming.
• Garden Fever! – This full-service, urban gardening oasis offers helpful advice on sustainable gardening practices, a select group of edibles and ornamentals—including more than 100 varieties of organic and sustainably grown tomatoes—and creatively merchandised items for home and garden.
• Rare Plant Research – Specializing in new and unusual plants for unique gardens, this small specialty nursery seeks plants from South Africa and other exotic locales. As interesting as the plant material is, you're bound to be lured to walk up to the gardens of the Spanish villa, built by the owner, which sits atop the hill overlooking a man-made pond and the nursery.
• Swan Island Dahlias – Swan Island Dahlias is the largest dahlia grower in the U.S. and has been in operation for over 85 years. The Gitts family has owned and operated the business for more than 40 years. They hybridize their own new varieties, planting over 30,000 seedlings each year. From those original seedlings, it takes about four years to introduce a new seedling for sale. Five to 15 new varieties are introduced each year. You'll see over 350 varieties on 40 acres, everything from small pom pom varieties to 10-inch blooms.
• Terra Nova Nurseries Inc. - Terra Nova® Nurseries has grown from a tiny lab and greenhouse to a world leader in perennial plant breeding. They have introduced over 700 new varieties to horticulture. Their display gardens are a site to behold...and you will do better than behold them, you'll walk through them. Their new introductions are distributed world-wide to wholesalers, garden centers and mail-order companies.