Forty years ago, Renee Shepherd was an instructor at UC Santa Cruz, having earned a Ph.D. at the university. She was accustomed to playing soccer with European graduate students and inviting them over for brunch.
At one of these gatherings, she befriended a Dutchman who was in the seed business. Aware of her passion for gardening, he spoke to her about outstanding varieties of lettuce grown in the Netherlands, Italy, and France that he was introducing to the American market. Shepherd saw an opportunity and mortgaged her home to start a mail-order seed business, marketing unusual seed varieties, including mesclun mixes.
Mesclun or baby leaf combines different types of salad greens — lettuces, endives, radicchio, escarole, and arugula. The advantage of growing this crop is that you can harvest a whole bed of it multiple times simply by cutting it back and then waiting for regrowth and additional harvests.
Call me naive, but I always had the idea that a packet seed company harvested seeds from plants locally grown. Little did I know. The truth is that packet seed companies of any size are brokers with international reach, procuring seeds from growers all over the globe. After conducting trials of vegetable, herb, and flower varieties for vigor, flavor, pest resistance and beauty (especially where flowers are concerned, but for certain vegetable varieties as well), the seeds of selected varieties are ordered in bulk.
Today, the company Shepherd founded — Renee’s Garden Seeds — has 90,000 online customers, sells to 1,200 garden center retailers, and produces 4.5 million packets of seeds each year. I interviewed her recently, and she made it clear to me that the company bearing her name is comparatively small.
“After all,” she confided. “There are 340 million people in this country, and lots of them grow vegetables, herbs, and flowers from seed.”
Indeed, according to a 2026 survey, 55% of US households (that’s roughly 71 million) have gardens, and 40% of those cultivate food gardens. It is estimated that 140 million seed packets are sold from store racks, catalogues, and online in this country each year.
Although Shepherd sold her company five years ago, she is still involved with a large trial garden where over 250 seed varieties are evaluated each year before being selected for inclusion in her company’s offerings.
I asked Shepherd what the novice needs to know to succeed in growing vegetables, herbs, and flowers from seed.
“There are three essential elements to successful growing from seed,” she explained. “First, learn what time of the year to plant each type of seed. Second, follow the instructions on the seed packet. Third, it’s very important to thin seedlings so each plant has room to grow.”
Shepherd says you can plant seeds in late winter to early spring, early summer, and late summer to early fall. When I tell her about the unusually warm winter we have experienced in Southern California this year, she suggests that now would be a good time for planting seeds of lettuces, all kinds of greens, and brassicas such as cabbage, kohlrabi, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, bok choy, and turnips.
When it comes to her personal vegetable favorites, Shepherd extols luscious French butterhead lettuces, sweet snack peppers, paprika peppers, and climbing zucchini. “It’s much easier harvesting the climbing variety than conventional earthbound zucchini,” she declares. She also singles out edamame (an edible variety of soybeans harvested in their pods), both for their taste and their ease of growing.
As for flowers, she loves Salpiglossis. This sturdy annual, a petunia relative, may bloom from late spring until fall. The seed packet description that she composed reads as follows: “Salpiglossis is one of the most dazzling of all old-fashioned flowers. Our selection, Stained Glass, is a very showy and weather-tolerant variety bred in England. These gorgeous flowers bloom hard all season in rich chocolate, deep blue, vermilion red, glowing orange, gold and dark purple with striking bicolors. Many of the 3-inch-throated blossoms have enchanting and exotic-looking butterfly-wing tracings. The 1-1/2 foot basal branching plants will light up your garden with radiant color.” Salpiglossis is sometimes referred to as trumpet tongue, derived from two Greek words — salpinx, meaning trumpet, and glossa, meaning tongue — that refer to the trumpet-shaped flowers with petals that protrude like tongues.
Shepherd notes with pride that Renee’s Garden offers common flowers in multiple colors and forms, such as 16 different nasturtiums and 23 zinnia varieties, as well as specialty mixes such as pollinator mixes and others. She speaks glowingly of sweet peas (Lathyrus odoratus), especially for their fragrance, which, in large bunches in vase arrangements, can perfume a room. At reneesgarden.com, under Gardening 101, you can find a number of videos and detailed explanations for every aspect of growing sweet peas. Multiple varieties of sweet peas, many of them heirlooms, are available to order from the site.
In résponse to a column about Jim Nuccio and Nuccio’s Nurseries, a legacy business in Altadena that specializes in camellias and azaleas and will be closing this spring, I received the following email from Ron Penman, who gardens in Northridge:
“Jim possessed incredible patience with all his customers. Regardless of the number of plants they were interested in purchasing, he walked them around the nursery helping them select the ‘perfect’ plant. . . Even when we didn’t really have a place in our garden for new plantings, we still went to the nursery once or twice a year, if for no other reason than to visit with Jim and view the beautiful grounds, though I don’t think we ever left the nursery without buying a plant.”
Patricia Alcorn speaks of planting camellias in the 1950s around a house that was sold in 1989. However, she would still drive by to inspect the plants that were there until they were destroyed, along with the house, in the Eaton Fire.
Jim Fitzpatrick, president of the American Camellia Society, drew my attention to a memorable video about Nuccio’s Nurseries, featuring brothers Jim and Tom, that he produced with his wife on the 75th anniversary of the business. To view it, go to youtube.com and search “Nuccio’s Nurseries, World Famous Camellias and Azaleas.”
David Gooler wrote: “It has always been a pleasure to hang with the Nuccio brothers. When they close down, they will leave a huge hole in the nursery trade, Altadena, and all those who want unique plants.”
And Michael Battistone, who gardens in Belmont, commented: “For over 40 years, my wife and I went there. Jim was always welcoming to us, always sincere and fun, great person to hang with; my wife and I enjoyed every minute there. Hopefully, all these years running up and down that hill has kept Jim healthy.”
California native of the week: Lady fern (Athyrium filix-femina) is as tough a fern as you will find. Like many ferns, it thrives in moist soil but is surprisingly drought-tolerant and does not require fertilization. In the worst case, completely neglected and deprived of water, it dies back to its rhizomes and then, when watered, is revived. I have never seen a lady fern that died but many that have spread a great distance. Still, you need not worry about it becoming invasive, as it is easily uprooted when it wanders into places you would rather not see it go.
