We specialize in exotic plants such as Passiflora, Protea and Clivia. However, we tend to sell any plant that strikes our fancy, so we are also expanding our collection of stapeliads, asclepiads and South African natives such as Adenias (succulent Passifloraceae). Everything we sell is grown & propagated in our nursery, we do not outsource anything.
Grassy Knoll is a very small, family-run nursery. We are located just outside Portland, Oregon and consist of two sisters, with a few temp workers (read: friends) throughout the year. And our husbands, when we can pull them into the chaos.
We currently are running two greenhouses, a large 30' x 60' greenhouse and a smaller 15' x 24' greenhouse.
Elizabeth is the owner and tends to the plants & shipping. She lives in Rainier, Oregon on a 20 acre farm. She has grown plants her whole life and has been running her professional greenhouse assiduously since 1998.
Elizabeth is a rare person -- she has loved plants with single-minded focus even when she was very little. One of her earliest memories was looking up at the seed heads of ornamental grasses waving in the wind. At 17 years old, when most teenagers would be dreaming about the popular heartthrob, she was dreaming of tropical plants. She crammed her mother's sewing room with a huge metal halide lamp on a timer and tropical flora such as banana plants, Passiflora, and even a small water garden in a barrel with water lilies and a soft-shelled turtle.
When she was in kindergarten, she saw a drawing of a passionvine in one of her children's books. Over time she learned what it was called and a lifelong obsession began. This eventually spread to other rare & tropical plants such as Protea, Leucadendron (her son Leucan's namesake), Clivia, Stapelias, Ceropegias and basically every South African native out there. In order to support her collecting habit, she began propagating & selling these rare & lovely plants at local markets. By 1998, she had been married for 1 year and started her business by propagating plants in her laundry room, the room that had the best light in the house and selling plants at the local farmer's market. In 2000, she built a small online shop and has been shipping plants to plant lovers ever since. Over the next 15 years she would expand to 2 large greenhouses, 3 children and a bunch of goats, cats and chickens.
Marketing & General Gopher
Deborah maintains the website, takes photos of plants & generally tries to help Elizabeth stay with her plants. While Elizabeth was a teenager constantly dreaming about plants, Deborah was dreaming of typography & couldn't stop staring at computers. Elizabeth's eyebrows would furrow in confusion at this fixation with electronic things. Oh, and Elizabeth is her older sister.
Deborah and her husband built a new GK website in 2007 and gradually over the next several years Deborah began helping more and more on the technology side and then eventually on the nursery side as well. If you find any errors in the plant names or information, it's guaranteed to be Deborah's fault, so please let us know if we've overlooked something! While her older sister Elizabeth spent all her time outside, Deborah has spent most of her life in front of a computer or with a camera. She shoots with a D7100 primarily with her beloved 50 mm f/1.8 lens. You can view any other EXIF data via the GK Flickr page. She has only recently become interested in plants, and constantly plies Elizabeth with information on everything from growing vegetables to maintaining water gardens.
