Field Notes No. 2: The day we lost the nursery, and the twenty percent that lived
Field Notes No. 2, sent to our list on 23 September 2026. Plant counts and availability were current that day and will have moved since.
We have been growing since 1976, which makes this our fiftieth year. I said last week that we would spend it telling you where the plants came from and some of our formative stories. This is the first of those, and it is not a cheerful one, but it is the one that explains a lot about us and I swear it has a happy ending.
The twenty percent
Bonsall, December 2017
The Lilac Fire was reported at 11:15 on the morning of December 7, 2017. By 11:35 it had burned five hundred acres. By two in the afternoon, three thousand. Most of what we sell is actually grown in Bonsall, in northern San Diego County. The fire burned through our Bonsall greenhouses and kept going. What it left behind smoldered all night.
Losing a greenhouse is not like losing a warehouse. A warehouse can be restocked. What burned that day included hand-sown hybrids that had taken twenty years to bring along, and in some cases thirty. There is no supplier you can call to replace a plant that only ever existed because somebody made a cross in 1994 and then waited. Thousands of them were gone in a few hours.
The financial loss ran into the millions. Here is what the fire did not account for. Tillandsias are built for hostile places. They live on bare rock and cliff faces and the tops of trees, withstanding the winds through branches, holding whatever water they can pull out of the air. Toughness is encoded in their design.
About twenty percent came through it. Scorched, badly stressed, but alive.
We kept every single plant with a speck of hope and chlorophyll. They were nursed along, grown back out, and as they recovered they did what tillandsias do, which is throw offsets from the base. Those offsets became plants. Those plants threw offsets of their own.
We rebuilt the nursery and replanted, and the fire survivors are still in the collection today, nine years on, quietly producing pups. Some of what we sell now is descended from plants that spent one night in 2017 on fire.
That one is a 'Houston', a Mark Dimmitt cross of T. stricta and T. recurvifolia from the 1980s. It is one of the toughest things we grow, and that photograph is some of the reason we keep saying so.
Three are on the site. Two Houstons, and a cross Dimmitt made from it.
Next up is how a plant we sell every week ended up in our nursery in California, which involves a Paraguayan mission, a driver named Ramon paid in beer, and roughly a hundred schoolchildren.
Thank you for sticking around!
Kendra
Rainforest Flora Inc