Plant Itineraries… California Natives… local species… Ceanothus ‘Ray Hartman’ originated by chance in 1929 at the Leonard Coates Nurseries in Morgan Hill… in our backyard now 🙂
A hybrid of Ceanothus arboreus and Ceanothus thyrsiflorus var. griseus that was collected near the town of Saratoga, a suburb of San Jose, and grown by Leonard Coates Nurseries, then owned by Ray Hartman and located in nearby Morgan Hill. The plant was originally introduced in the late 1940s under the name ‘Blue Sky’. In 1950 Hartman established the Saratoga Horticultural Research Foundation and in 1954 it was introduced by the foundation and renamed ‘Ray Hartman’ in recognition of all he had done on behalf of California’s native flora. The genus name comes from the Greek word keanthos which was used to describe a type of thistle and meaning a “thorny plant” or “spiny plant” and first used by Linnaeus in 1753 to describe New Jersey Tea, Ceanothus americanus.
Ceanothus ‘Ray Hartman’, Mountain Lilac
Ceanothus ‘Ray Hartman’ – Ray Hartman Wild Lilac