About Us

Villager Nursery has deep and broad knowledge and experience relevant to High Sierra natives and adapted plants, soils, fertilizers, irrigation, gardening techniques, and much more. We are a retail nursery providing small-landscape and restorations in Truckee and the throughout the Northern Sierras. As avid botanists, naturalists and gardeners with degrees in the biological and horticultural sciences, we specialize in education, native ecosystems, extreme cold-hardy plants, unique and interesting “color”, as well as durable arts and gifts.

We’ve been experimenting in our own mountain gardens and landscapes and vicariously through thousands of our clients and friends since 1975

We’re happy to admit that, at home, in the nursery and in our demonstration gardens, (through trials and tests) we’ve killed thousands of “hardy plants” so our clients won’t have to. We are constantly learning and then sharing what we’ve learned. Our local climate and conditions are unusual. Landscaping, gardening and restoration work here can be extraordinarily challenging. The owners’ strong scientific educational backgrounds and their many years of high Sierra experience give Villager Nursery a uniquely powerful ability to anticipate performance, problem-solve and provide an un-matched and necessary service to the entire region.

Landscape Design

Bulk Plant Sales

Home-visit Consultation

Landscape Installation

Planting

Landscape Construction Supervision

Custom Planters and Hanging Baskets

Wedding Plant Rental

Phone Orders and Deliveries

Design Review and Plant Suggestions

Plant Survey

Development Plant Lists and Design Guidelines

Gardening Talks and Guest Lectures

Custom Wildflower, Restoration and Pasture Seed Mixtures

We’re active in the community in environmental education. Our public service is extensive. We’ve worked with the school district,  individual classes, community gardens and parks as well as garden clubs on many projects. We’ve been involved with the Truckee River Watershed, local Land Trusts and the Town of Truckee in many capacities as consultants, planners, crew leaders or laborers. We have close associations with several respected local landscaping companies and good relationships with outstanding regional nurseries as well. Villager Nursery is highly regarded by educated nurserymen, arborists and experts in related fields and we maintain the highest moral, ethical and professional standards.

Mountain Garden & Landscaping Services

Villager Nursery offers Expert Gardening Talks, Horticultural Demonstrations, Wildflower Hikes, Historical Walks, Volunteer Opportunities and Passionate Mountain Gardening Conversation. We currently advise and consult on a wide variety of botanical, horticultural, arboricultural, agricultural, environmental restoration and revegetation issues for individual, businesses, subdivisions, institutions and agencies. We provide construction supervision and maintain a landscape division that serves clients from Kirkwood to Sierra City. We have been landscape contractors since 1977 with over 500 commercial, residential and government projects in our portfolio. We offer Home-Visit and Site Consultations as well as Landscaping and Planting Services.

Mission

Our purpose, as always, is to remain the primary source for honest and reliable high-Sierra gardening information while offering the widest and most interesting variety of native, extreme climate and cold hardy plants, as well as the best organic fertilizers and appropriate soil amendments available. Our hope is to give our clients everything they need to succeed and find satisfaction in their mountain planters, gardens and landscapes. Villager Nursery supports California Native Plant Society’s mission of “conserving California native plants and their natural habitats, and increasing understanding, appreciation, and horticultural use of native plants … through education, plant science, advocacy, land stewardship and native plant gardening.”

Vision

Villager Nursery is a relaxed and intriguing retail space with instructive and inviting pathways through demonstration gardens with art, pottery, and an astounding display of the best plants available for our challenging conditions. Owners and staff are people who love plants, who care about their coworkers’, friends’ and clients’ successes and who graciously share their knowledge. We maintain and modify our gardens and plant selections as our gardens grow and our clients’ interests evolve. We reduce water use, recycle, use only natural and organic fertilizers and pest controls. We collect seed and experiment with the widest variety of locally native plants to offer and use them whenever possible. We provide the best plants, adapted to our harsh conditions, for every situation. We continue to learn and to use every opportunity to educate each other, our customers and anyone curious or interested.

Values

Integrity

We sincerely care. Our experience and education are authentic. Our reputation is why we persist. Our clients are long-term genuine friends.

Honesty

The core of our integrity. Truth, always. We don’t guess or b.s. If we don’t KNOW the answer we find it. If a plant won’t thrive where a client wants it, we’ll offer a better choice.

Curiosity

Why? How? When? Where? What? If we don’t know, we want to and we want to share what we’ve learned from our experiences. We are always learning more.

Gratitude

We appreciate where we live and who we live with. We are grateful for our natural environment and staff. We appreciate our clients and all that we learn from them.

Enthusiasm

Dang! We LOVE what we get to do every day and we love to share what we’ve learned. “There is always NEXT spring…” to learn again, to try something new, to share again.

Partnership

Our staff, our growers and our clients who we learn from and who keep us going.

Service

“Everyone Serves” each other, our clients, other staff, our vendors, ourselves.

Goals

Stewardship and Sustainability

Find, use and offer local and intermountain native plants. Find, use and offer natural and organic amendments, nutrients and controls. Encourage temporary or low-volume irrigation, mulching and microclimate-appropriate plant selections.

Grace and Guidance

Make sure every one is given the opportunity to understand the foundation of all basic or complex ideas, concepts or systems and make sure no one (staff or client) ever feels their question is beneath us. Contribute humble enlightenment. (We all have so much we can learn and it is always exciting to see new gardeners grasping fundamentals that lead to greater understanding of gardens and of nature.)

Research and Discovery

Be curious. Never stop learning what works and what doesn’t and find out why. Investigate climates, visit nurseries, communicate with colleagues and educators and constantly explore for new plants. Seek ways to grow even more, often challenging, local natives. And always test for additional cold-hardier, tougher, better blooming, animal-insusceptible, fire-resistive, better screening, faster growing, fall-colorful, snow-adapted, drought-tolerant plants to make our clients’ gardening experiences more rewarding. (We really have killed tens of thousands of plants in our own landscapes and demonstration gardens while testing new species from the Sierras, the Cascades, the Rockies and from around the globe, finding what will work for our clients). “Research you can use and Information you can trust”

Partnership and Collaboration

Partner with colleagues, botanists, nurserymen, growers, researchers, professors, universities, salespeople, curators, our parks, gardens, arboretums, conservationists, regulators, planners, designers, arborists, landscapers, caretakers, gardeners, clients, coworkers and friends. Share experiences to enhance our understanding and expand our knowledge.

Joy and Compassion

Cultivate a staff of like-minded, fun, kind, sympathetic, humble, good-humored, curious, enthusiastic, nurturing, plant-loving and people-loving humans (and cats). Everyone strives to learn and share what they learn. Everyone wants to contribute. Everyone encourages and serves everyone else.

Purpose

We want to do our part to leave the Earth better than we found it.

Our purpose is to more than compensate for our individual impacts on this planet by encouraging the use of native plants and promoting practices and techniques that foster native ecosystems. We want to plant and enable planting of woody trees and shrubs, that along with the soil fungi, will sequester thousands of tons of carbon from our atmosphere during just our lifetimes. We encourage home gardening because even the smallest garden foster’s a love of nature and an appreciation of plants while incrementally helping our food systems.

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