Home & Garden Columns

Garden Variety: Sebastopol Field Trip: A New Nursery

By Ron Sullivan
Friday July 27, 2007

Sebastopol is not exactly next door, but the Apple Capital of Sonoma County is a great excuse for a day trip. The Gravenstein Highway (Route 116) between US101 and the town is lined with roadside attractions, botanical and otherwise, although there seems to have been a sudden wave of mortality among the local antique stores. 

Peacock Horticultural Nursery is the new kid on the block. Robert Peacock and Marty Waldron opened it two years ago, after moving up from San Leandro three years before that. Peacock, a landscape designer, also did plant merchandising for the flagship Smith & Hawken in Mill Valley, until the company decided it had grown beyond mere plants.  

The place they found in Sonoma, just down the road a piece from California Carnivores, had a history as a nursery: the previous owner grew violets for sale at a roadside stand. “There’s a fantastic legacy of camellias, old roses, old landscape,” Waldron said. It’s bracketed by huge old oaks where red-shouldered hawks yodel and acorn woodpeckers yammer. 

Peacock’s (“PeaHort” to its friends) may be small, but it’s densely packed with plants. There’s a bit of everything: succulents, cycads, aroids, bonsai, grasslike things. “We love the restios,” admits Waldron. The owners describe the place as “dedicated to providing unusual, obscure and hard to find plant choices for the collector as well as the home gardener,” and it shows. 

“Robert is always looking for unusual stuff,” Waldron continues. “We’re trying to find a niche, something little and unusual. And no tchotchkes.” They’ll try to propagate anything, like the mystery Miscanthus, maybe South African in origin, they picked up at a UC Botanical Garden sale a while back.  

With all that variety, Peacock’s twin (and overlapping) strengths would be shade plants and variegated-foliage specimens. Waldron touts an Acer ‘Eskimo Sunset’ as “plant of the month,” and it really is a stunner: cream and green patterned leaves with a strong blush of burgundy on their undersides. Other things you wouldn’t think came in variegated varieties pop up: violets, ceanothus, hydrangea, a little cactus, elderberry. 

The pride of resident cats—one of whom, a gray tabby, rejoices in the name Hortus Third—adds to the nursery’s atmosphere. Waldron calls them “our marketing directors,” all domesticated from feral families. 

We stopped at Peacock’s mainly to pick up a Sonoma Farm Trails map, since our road atlas didn’t do justice to the county’s back roads, and left with a whole flat of stuff for our shady spots. Peacock and Waldron are finding more than one niche to fill, and their establishment deserves more than a casual look. 

In fact, it requires more than a casual look. The sign pops up suddenly on the busy road, and like all those nurseries on the road to Half Moon Bay it’s an invitation to a rear-end collision. Take it slow and resist the road’s importunate tailgaters. Peacock Nursery is too good to miss. 

 

Sebastopol field trip: a new nursery among the antiques and apple orchards 

 

Sebastopol is not exactly next door, but the Apple Capital of Sonoma County is a great excuse for a day trip. The Gravenstein Highway (Route 116) between US101 and the town is lined with roadside attractions, botanical and otherwise, although there seems to have been a sudden wave of mortality among the local antique stores. 

Peacock Horticultural Nursery is the new kid on the block. Robert Peacock and Marty Waldron opened it two years ago, after moving up from San Leandro three years before that. Peacock, a landscape designer, also did plant merchandising for the flagship Smith & Hawken in Mill Valley, until the company decided it had grown beyond mere plants.  

The place they found in Sonoma, just down the road a piece from California Carnivores, had a history as a nursery: the previous owner grew violets for sale at a roadside stand. “There’s a fantastic legacy of camellias, old roses, old landscape,” Waldron said. It’s bracketed by huge old oaks where red-shouldered hawks yodel and acorn woodpeckers yammer. 

Peacock’s (“PeaHort” to its friends) may be small, but it’s densely packed with plants. There’s a bit of everything: succulents, cycads, aroids, bonsai, grasslike things. “We love the restios,” admits Waldron. The owners describe the place as “dedicated to providing unusual, obscure and hard to find plant choices for the collector as well as the home gardener,” and it shows. 

“Robert is always looking for unusual stuff,” Waldron continues. “We’re trying to find a niche, something little and unusual. And no tchotchkes.” They’ll try to propagate anything, like the mystery Miscanthus, maybe South African in origin, they picked up at a UC Botanical Garden sale a while back.  

With all that variety, Peacock’s twin (and overlapping) strengths would be shade plants and variegated-foliage specimens. Waldron touts an Acer ‘Eskimo Sunset’ as “plant of the month,” and it really is a stunner: cream and green patterned leaves with a strong blush of burgundy on their undersides. Other things you wouldn’t think came in variegated varieties pop up: violets, ceanothus, hydrangea, a little cactus, elderberry. 

The pride of resident cats—one of whom, a gray tabby, rejoices in the name Hortus Third—adds to the nursery’s atmosphere. Waldron calls them “our marketing directors,” all domesticated from feral families. 

We stopped at Peacock’s mainly to pick up a Sonoma Farm Trails map, since our road atlas didn’t do justice to the county’s back roads, and left with a whole flat of stuff for our shady spots. Peacock and Waldron are finding more than one niche to fill, and their establishment deserves more than a casual look. 

In fact, it requires more than a casual look. The sign pops up suddenly on the busy road, and like all those nurseries on the road to Half Moon Bay it’s an invitation to a rear-end collision. Take it slow and resist the road’s importunate tailgaters. Peacock Nursery is too good to miss. 

 

 

 

Peacock Horticultural Nursery 

4296 Gravenstein Highway South 

(Highway 116), Sebastopol 

(707) 291-0547 

9 a.m.–5 p.m. Wed.–Sun. or by appointment 

www.peacockhorticulturalnursery.com 

 

 

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.