Home & Garden Columns

I’d heard a rumor (Thanks, Chris!) that Ken’s Nursery in San Pablo was up for sale, so I moseyed on up San Pablo Avenue to that weird intersection like a broken asterisk, the corner of Where Value Village Used to Be and Where Bertola’s Used to Be. It’s just before the Mall Under Construction, mere blocks north of Casino San Pablo and the Alvarado adobe. 

You know, just past the trailer park they’re going to evict for development. That intersection. 

It’s been a while since I’ve dropped in there. The nursery backs onto San Pablo Creek, with a deck set high over the banks looking down on a mix of invasive exotics like German and Algerian ivy, plain-green houseplant tradescantia, and what looks very much like pokeweed. I’ve always liked to stop and scan for birds in the creekside trees—there were a few housefinches, one of them singing, last weekend, and I swear we were hearing geese somewhere—and stand on tiptoe to look over the wall at the creek.  

It’s clear that the recent freeze took a bite out of the stock. The bananas were sulking (though their central growing points looked healthy); some of the six-pack shelves were bare. But the annual color was cheerful, there were plenty of evergreens, and all the citrus looked unfazed.  

And yes, the place is for sale. I talked to owner Kikue Tokuyoshi-Wong, who cited a combination of family necessities and market pressures: “The big-box stores have really hurt us all, of course.” People don’t know any better than to want instant, maintenance-free gardens, in which they think of plants as wallpaper or furniture.  

We spent a few minutes in the kind of gossip I’ve engaged in too often: who used to own what nursery (that’s the jolly part) and when it closed down (the mournful part). Mostly this is family stories: rather a lot of the owners of our remaining family-owned nurseries are related to each other, at least by marriage. 

It bugs me that so many of these old-line nurseries are biting the dust, not just because I’m sentimental. We lose unique knowledge bases and history, and sometimes even plant varieties that have been propagated here over generations. There are heirloom nurseries just as there are heirloom tomatoes.  

Even non-propagating nurseries, which serve entirely as plant retailers rather than growers, have stores of lore about what does well in their parts of town, the sort of oral guidebook that a loyal customer base has let them accumulate.  

There’s no way to predict how long the sale of Ken’s Nursery might take. Prices aren’t reduced, though they’re certainly reasonable; it’s just interesting stuff at an interesting place.  

Get up there soon and maybe you’ll get some of those bush blueberries or kumquat or calamondin or bai makrut trees before I do. Look the other fruit trees over—apple, peach, cherry, Asian pear, greengage—for interesting varieties, ask about their chill requirements, try one anyway. Planting a fruit tree is a better gamble than you’ll get at the casino.  

Ken’s Nursery 

2364 Road 20, San Pablo 

234-1541 

Weekdays 9 a.m.-5 p.m. (5:30 during DST) 

Weekends 9 a.m.-4 p.m. 

Closed Wednesdays 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.