Saving Sebastopol’s Hidden Forest
The owner of Hidden Forest Nursery is turning the property into a nonprofit botanical reserve, kicking off with a fundraiser on Earth Day, April 22.
Hidden Forest Nursery is a magical place: seven and a half acres of forest and an extensive shade plant nursery hidden away on a dead-end street off Hessel just south of Sebastopol.
Owner Mike Boss bought the property, which used to be called Sonoma Horticultural Nursery, from Polo de Lorenzo and Warren Smith in 2017, during the Tubbs Fire.
“A really good friend of mine, a horticulturalist in his own right, said ‘You know, Mike, you're the only one who's buying land in Sonoma County this month.’”
Founder of the San Francisco landscaping company, Rock & Rose, Boss had been looking for a nursery property for years.
“The vertical integration between having a nursery and a landscaping company that designs builds and cares for gardens was extraordinarily positive,” he said.
But it wasn’t just an economic decision.
“Namely, I knew it needed to be saved,” he said, and told the now oft-told tale of how he wrestled it away from a real estate developer.
“It’s not like it was going to be turned into condos or anything—there’s zoning rules,” he admits, but he says it would have been turned into private homes and would no longer be available to the public.
A little piece of heaven—made by man and nature
To walk the one and a half miles of paths at Hidden Forest is to enter a different world, filled with birdsong, towering trees and rare and beautiful shade plants from around the world.
But the Hidden Forest property wasn’t always the paradise it is today. In fact, it wasn’t always a forest. Part of the original Hessel Ranch, it was once just a patch of windswept grassland and blackberry bramble.
Stewart and Audrey Barber bought the property in 1964, planted some trees and created what was known as the Azalea Farm, growing and hybridizing Exbury Azaleas. When De Lorenzo and Smith purchased the property in 1976 much of it was still overgrown with blackberry and weeds. Over the years, they and their employees Armando and Salvatore, who still work at Hidden Forest, cleared the rest of the property and planted more trees till it became the forest garden that exists today.
The property fell into disrepair as the previous owners aged, and Boss and his crew have spent the last five years sprucing it up.
Now Boss is taking another step to ensure that the forest will be protected in perpetuity. He’s turning Hidden Forest Nursery into a nonprofit called the Hidden Forest Botanical Reserve.
The mission of the nonprofit is “to inspire nature appreciation and education through protecting, preserving, improving and promoting nature sanctuaries.”
Over the last several years, Hidden Forest has developed a kind of double life. There’s the nursery, but there’s also a whole educational and (for lack of a better word) spiritual side to the place, embodied in the numerous classes and other experiences offered there, such as docent-led nature tours and forest bathing.
When Hidden Forest becomes a nonprofit, the nursery—home to acres of rhododendrons, azaleas, Japanese maples and other shade loving plants—will take a back seat to the nonprofit’s educational and botanical preservation projects, becoming something like a museum store—a side business that helps support the mission of the nonprofit.
“It took me a while to really understand what this place was—and what happens here, aside from it being beautiful,” Boss said. “And I will admit that when I first got here, there were a lot of selfish reasons for it: knowing how valuable this place was, because of my career and my education, my love of botanical gardens and things like that. But it gradually dawned on me that this place was way bigger than me. And yeah, I want to stay here for the rest of my life. But I don't need to own the property.”
The other reason for becoming a nonprofit, of course, is that, financially speaking, owning and maintaining a botanical preserve has been a wild ride.
“It's been very iffy to be a financial suspense story,” Boss said. “You could make a film or novel about the incredible unexpected difficulties and unexpected angels that would come by here. I always thought the community would support this place—and they did spiritually and encouragement-wise, but financially no.”
“There were people who really understood this place and wanted to help me, but they didn't have the money. They had friends with the money and when they talked to their friends, their friends go ‘Wow, sounds incredible. But wait. You want me to donate to a business?’”
Boss hopes becoming a nonprofit will solve that particular stumbling block.
Want to support Hidden Forest?
Visit Hidden Forest at 3970 Azalea Lane, Sebastopol, or learn more about it here. You can shop for shade plants, take a class, or simply explore the paths around the property.
You can also go to an Earth Day Fundraiser with food, wine, and music this Saturday, April 22, from 2 to 6 pm at Hessel Grange, 5400 Blank Road, Sebastopol. There will be appetizers, non-alcoholic elixirs and soft drinks; acoustic blues, country, and rock ‘n roll music by The Doc Kraft Band. There will also be educational displays, a community seed swap (bring your seeds in labeled packets), a plant sale, activities for kids, a slide show of The Hidden Forest, as well as a raffle and a silent auction. Get tickets.