Italio Gardens

About

The 2 acres of Italio Gardens began growing around my home in 1978, when I arrived and established a mail-order nursery here that needed a grand display garden for our catalog products that included rare plants of all sizes, from trees to small alpine plants. Thus, the Siskiyou Rare Plant Nursery thrived here for nearly 30 years, but I sold it and it moved away and I stayed with the garden, now known as Italio Gardens. Originally the land was bare, flat pasture land with cows and horses grazing, so I established groves of trees of all kinds: all three redwoods; rare species of deciduous trees; native and non-native conifers; and dozens of Japanese maple cultivars. The 70-foot-long tunnel greenhouse, which once turned out hundreds of small pots of rock garden plants, is now filled in the warm season with flowering subtropical plants including large Begonia and Abutilon collections. Flagstone pathways lead the visitor throughout a maze of garden rooms, including the shady goldfish pond at the house entrance, to the sunny rock garden beside Mt. Halda, which is a towering rock crevice garden of 100 tons of native granite boulders. From a higher pathway a waterfall emerges and tumbles into the koi and waterlily pond below. Wandering further into the gardens, there is an open woodland with rare shrubs and a collection of wild roses. A couple of ancient grapevines create a wall of foliage between the colorful cutting garden and the “urbanite” (broken concrete) crevice rock garden filled with tiny dryland gems. A little rare plant nursery still functions on the property because I cannot stop propagating seeds, cuttings, and divisions from this nursery garden.

This garden’s estimated size is 1-1/2 acres.

2025 Open Day:  Sunday, May 18

Hours:10-4