The nursery that outlived its namesake.

Theodore Payne — English horticulturalist, champion of California native plants, stubborn advocate for a landscape most Californians preferred to pave — died in 1963 at the age of 91. Three years later, a friend donated twenty acres of Sun Valley canyon land to the foundation that carries his name. The nursery has been there, on the same canyon acres, ever since.

Theodore Payne, 1872 – 1963

Theodore Payne was born in Northamptonshire, England in June 1872. Orphaned young, he was sent to the Ackworth School and then apprenticed for three years to J. Cheal & Sons, a nursery firm in Crawley, Sussex. In 1891, while still a teenager, he first encountered California native plants at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in London. The encounter set the course of the rest of his life. In June 1893, immediately after finishing his apprenticeship, Payne sailed to the United States and made his way to Los Angeles.

He opened his first nursery in Los Angeles in 1903. California native plants were already being displaced by citrus groves, eucalyptus windbreaks, and suburban lawns imported from the Midwest; Payne watched the native flora disappear in real time and set himself the lifelong task of preserving it. He collected seeds. He built plant lists. He designed gardens. He wrote catalogs. He supplied native-plant material to major public installations — including gardens at Caltech, the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, and the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. He kept a business ledger that now runs to thousands of pages of personal and professional correspondence with seed houses across Europe and the United States.

During the 1930s, a large portion of Payne's nursery land was taken by the City for stormwater improvements. In 1941, his bank foreclosed on the remaining property. He was allowed to lease back a small portion and spent his remaining decades focused exclusively on California natives. The business was never large. It was never supposed to be.

The Foundation, and the move to Sun Valley

The Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants was incorporated in 1960, when Payne was 88, as a nonprofit vehicle to continue his work after his death. The Foundation's first planned nursery site was at Whittier Narrows on Army Corps of Engineers land. Dedication ceremonies were held on January 19, 1963 — Payne himself spoke at the event. Shortly afterward, the Army Corps withdrew permission to use the land, having apparently just discovered that the Foundation was intending to sell plants. Payne died on May 6, 1963. He was 91.

In 1966, a nurseryman named Eddie Merrill, a colleague and friend of Payne, donated a 20-acre property in Sun Valley to the Foundation. The Foundation moved in and has not moved since. An adjacent two-acre parcel was acquired in 1969 for offices. The combined 22-acre property at 10459 Tuxford Street is the Foundation's permanent home and the oldest native-plant nursery in Los Angeles County.

In 1971, California Garden Clubs declared the Sun Valley nursery a bird sanctuary. More than 60 bird species have been identified on the property.

What they grow

The Theodore Payne Foundation nursery offers more than 400 species of California native plants and roughly 200 seed species to the public. The inventory includes oaks (including the Island Oak, Quercus tomentella), manzanitas, sages, grasses (Indian Ricegrass, for example), Humboldt's Lily, Shaw's Agave, Hooker's Evening Primrose, Seep Monkeyflower, Showy Penstemon, Santa Cruz Ironwood, Baja Spurge, Canyon Sunflower, and the full range of California wildflowers — lupines, poppies, gilias, phacelias, clarkias — that briefly turn the hills of Southern California into a seasonal spectacle every spring.

The sales yard is still watered by hand, which is an intentional choice. The automatic irrigation installed in 2002 runs only in the growing areas. The Foundation also maintains hiking trails through the canyon acreage, a seed room, a bookstore, an art gallery, and demonstration gardens where visitors can see how a particular species behaves in different soil types and exposures.

The programs

The Foundation runs the Annual Native Plant Garden Tour, held every April, featuring 40+ Los Angeles-area home gardens that are at least 50 percent California native. It runs the Wild Flower Hotline, a decades-old spring service that tells callers where in California to find the best wildflower blooms on any given weekend. It runs horticulture, design, and plant-animal-relationship classes for adults, field trips for elementary school students, in-classroom programs, and changing botanical art exhibits in the gallery. The Foundation also administers a TPF Job Board connecting ecologically minded landscapers with clients across Southern California.