Sean Hogan, design consultant, author and nursery owner, was born in Portland and spent his later childhood years in Sacramento. He pursued his education in horticulture and botany at American River College and Sacramento State. Early work included mapping rare and endangered plants for the State of California as well as landscape and design work, often revolving around his love of western natives.
From the mid-80s to the mid-90s, Sean worked as the curator of South African, New Zealand, Australian, New World Desert and California Native Cultivar Gardens at the UC Berkeley Botanic Garden. In 1995, he and his partner, UC Davis Arboretum Botanist Parker Sanderson, returned to Portland to start a design and consultation firm specializing in regionally appropriate plants for the Pacific Northwest. This eventually evolved into their opening Cistus Nursery, located on Sauvie Island in the Columbia River west of Portland. Cistus Nursery is highly regarded as one of the best west coast retail/micronurseries and is known worldwide for its collection of rare plants and advocacy of unusual and underused plants.
Hogan has lectured extensively in North America and Europe, and has conducted explorations in South America, South Africa and the western regions of the United States and northern Mexico. His writing and photos can be found in an extremely wide range of horticultural and botanical literature. He was the consulting editor of the 20,000-plus entry FLORA: A Gardener’s Encyclopedia, published in 2003, and he published Trees for all Seasons in 2008, both by Timber Press.
We Thought We Couldn’t, But We Can! Through the magic of plant hunting and research, we have so many new plants, and much tougher versions of those we once thought un-growable in colder climates. Take a look at some of these surprises.
