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About Us

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Though an animal husbandry major in college in southern California, Jackson Muldoon also picked up a number of horticultural skills. As it turned out, the crucial one was grafting. After graduating, he put together a grafting crew, and was able to convince some orchardists that grafting was a cheaper and faster way to switch to new varieties of fruit, better enabling them to respond to market demands. Jack was able to make a decent living in this way for part of the year, but there was a problem. Grafting could only be done in the spring and summer. During the remainder of the year, he was out of work. 

In this situation, most people would look for an off-season job, but Jack is, well, different. He reasoned that, if he could only graft during the spring and summer, then he obvioulsly had to spend half the year in the southern hemisphere. 

So off he went to Australia, New Zealand, where there are sophisitcated agricultural systems and plenty of work for grafting crews. While working in the nurseries and seeing the country, he was taken by the unique flora of these  areas. As a born collector, he couldn't resist. He brought back what he could, and found seed sources for what he couldn't. Back home, he built a greenhouse for his collection, and started adding to it. Before long, it was totally out of control, and Trans-Pacific Nursery was born. Its first Collectors' List was published in 1985. 

   Once started on the unusual plant route, there was no turning back. People saw his collection and started bringing or sending him their strange plants. Yearly grafting trips to Florida brought in a number of tropicals. Pretty soon, new greenhouses were needed.

In 1996, Jack traveled to the Kunming Institute of Botany in Kunming, Yunnan Province, southwest China. Since then, he has returned several times, exploring regions not open to westerners for many years, and in some cases never before explored. The region is a botanical treasurehouse, with a great variety of climates and habitats, from lowland tropics to Tibetan alpine.

Our Founder (left) and Friend at Kunming Botanic Gardens.

The nursery's present collection is unique, not only because it contains many very unusual plants, but also because of the wide range of plant types included. We don't specialize in tropicals or hardy alpines or water plants or desert plants; rather, we have plants in virtually all categories, from all habitats, and from all parts of the world, whether they border the Pacific or not. We have described our plants as coming from "the four corners of the seven seas". We do, however, continue to emphasize plants from the Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, China , and the Himalayas.

We're located in western Oregon, an area where most everything can be grown without adding too much winter heat, but which still has definite seasons. We sell via mailorder and at sales and markets. Although we've tried to accomodate visitors in various ways, it just doesn't work out for us. One reason as that much of what we do doesn't happen where the plants are grown; our shipping and office facilities are in a different town, and we graft at other nurseries and orchards, sometimes in other states. Our schedules are not predictable, changing with the weather and other factors, so for now we are not accepting visitors. We attend several sales and markets throughout the year, including the Hardy Plant Society of Oregon show and sale the second weekends of April and September, at the Washington County Fairgrounds, Hillsboro, Oregon; The Portland Japanese Garden sale in late April, the Clackamas Co. Spring Garden Fair at the Clackamas Co. Fairgrounds, Canby, OR, the Destination Imagination plant sale at Alton Baker Park in Eugene, Oregon in late April or earl, and the Salem Saturday Market at Marion & Summer streets in downtown Salem, Oregon every Saturday from May through October (we may miss some weekends that conflict with other sales). If you are close to one of these sites,we can bring orders to you there, to save you the cost of shipping.

Grafting still plays an important role at the nursery. A sister business, Pacific Propagators, provides us with a large stock of unusual varieties of Japanese maples, out of the tens of thousands they graft annually. 

Well, we could go on, but why not just browse through the catalog and come to your own conclusions?