Spring Intern at Illahe

Please welcome Lindsey Murray, Our 2025 Spring Chemeketa Community College cooperative work experience intern. Lindsey has been working for us part time since last years bulb shipping season and is now working here through the Chemeketa horticulture internship program. This valuable program provides students with college credit for on the job training and skills learning while they work toward an associates degree. I love the internship program because it was as student in a similar program 25 years ago through Oregon State University that I found my way into the rock gardening world and my gardening life has been geologically and botanically richer because of it.

Lindsey and Chaco have been busy packing plant orders the last few weeks. Chaco mostly doing guard dog duty and laying about.

Lindsey has a business degree from Western Oregon University and is currently working towards her associates degree in horticulture. Her botanical interests include cut flower gardening, arranging bouquets and seeing the joy that her creations bring to people when they receive a beautiful bunch of flowers. She enjoys flower pressing, dried flower arrangements and wreath making as well. Lindsey has an interest in landscape design and we are hoping she may someday be designing rock gardens! To that end, her required reading for her term her is the wonderful NARGS publication: Rock Garden Design and Construction One of her projects is going to be making a plan to turn the front lawn into a low growing, hopefully no mow, alpine meadow planting, a project that has been sitting on the back burner for way too long.

In her spare time, Lindsey enjoys reading non-fiction and sewing and was telling me about her vintage singer sewing machine score at an estate sale recently. I have had Lindsey as a student in classes I have taught and I appreciate her thoughtful views and positive outlook and her always interesting discussions on podcasts she has been listening to. Lindsey spent much of her winter work time here sewing seeds for upcoming catalog offerings and her attention to detail and careful, precision work is a nice balance to my often careening, hurried rush from task to task. If you hear 1980’s music coming from the shop you know that Lindsey is carefully packing plant orders to ship out. We super excited to have Lindsey here for her internship experience and to help foster her horticultural career!

This is Joleens favorite Moraea hybrid of the season, they are all so unique and wonderful it’s hard to pick a favorite, but this is certainly a winner.

Updates:

Orders are shipping out now, thank you to all the customers who got in on the first offering of the season. Keep an eye on that front porch for your box of illahe treasures ready to go into the garden!

We have a few local sales and plant deliveries to do, so the shipping availability will be offline for a bit next week as we get ready for that, then we will be back with another restocking of offerings for May shipping to your garden. This will feature some old favorites and some new plants not offered in the first round.

For all the customers inquiring about the sold out bulbs, this is a reminder that the flower bulb availability is updated in July.

It was nice to have a bit of rain back this Saturday AM, this has been an pretty long dry spell for April and I don’t want to harbinger of anything, but the year we got the heat dome that brought insane temperatures to the NW we had an unusually dry April.

In the mean time please enjoy a few more Moraea as the South African collection continues to segway into the Calochortus season in the bulb house.

These Moraea hybrids are really something else, I love the mustard colored ones but the purple and blues and whites are stunning as well.

2025 Spring Alpine and Rock Garden plant Catalog is online now!