Heirloom roses,
hand-grafted
since 1978.
A second-generation, family-run nursery of 312 rare and heritage cultivars — grafted by hand on our fourteen-acre farm in Woodburn, Oregon, and shipped dormant-root to gardeners in all fifty states and eleven Canadian provinces.
A first graft, made
by hand in 1978.
— Hisako Tanaka-Ross, Founder
In the spring of 1978, Hisako Tanaka-Ross drove a borrowed pickup to a four-acre hayfield her husband had grown up on, just outside Woodburn, Oregon. She carried, in the back, seven rose cuttings she had taken the previous autumn from the garden of an elderly neighbor in Salem — among them a wood-stock Rosa 'Madame Hardy' and a maiden cutting of Rosa 'Sombreuil' that had taken root in a coffee can on her kitchen windowsill.
She had no farm, no greenhouse, no employees. She had spent three years reading every American Rose Society yearbook she could find at the Multnomah County Library, and she had decided that the old European cultivars — the Bourbons, the Damasks, the once-blooming wild crosses that nurseries on either coast had quietly stopped growing after the war — deserved a home on the West Coast too.
She grafted those first seven roses herself, on Dr. Huey rootstock, in a lean-to potting shed she built from the packing crates of a Japanese importing firm in Portland. Six of the seven took. By autumn she had ninety-three plants in the ground, and a one-line advertisement in the back of Organic Gardening that read, simply: "Heirloom roses, hand-grafted, Willamette Valley. Hisako Roses."
Forty-seven seasons later, that hayfield is a fourteen-acre specialty nursery of 312 cultivars, and the seven grafted roses are the parents — by cutting and by seed — of nearly every plant we still sell. Hisako died in 2011. Her name stays on the gate.
A rose that is grafted by hand, by a person whose name you can ask for, will grow in a garden that lasts longer than the catalogue that sold it. We are not in the business of selling roses. We are in the business of making gardeners.
Forty-seven seasons,
one Willamette valley.
A short index of the years that shaped the farm — from a coffee-can cutting on a Salem windowsill to the 2025 collection of 312 cultivars shipping to all fifty states.
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1978
A first graft, in a lean-to shed.
Hisako Tanaka-Ross grafts seven cuttings on Dr. Huey rootstock in a hayfield outside Woodburn, Oregon. Six take. The nursery is born.
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1996
The first exclusive U.S. license.
Hisako signs the first of seven exclusive U.S. licenses with the Keisei Rose Collection of Japan, bringing cultivars previously unavailable in North America to the farm.
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2011
A second generation takes the gate.
Hisako's daughter, Midori Tanaka-Ross, formally assumes stewardship of the farm at the age of twenty-nine — the same age her mother was when she grafted the first seven. The team grows from four to nine master grafters.
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2023
Inducted into the Pacific Northwest Horticultural Hall of Fame.
Forty-five years of continuous operation, 312 cultivars in production, and the seventh generation of grafters training under Midori. The farm is recognised for its contribution to heritage horticulture.
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2025
The 2025 collection — 312 cultivars, 47 of them Hisako's alone.
This season's catalogue opens for orders on the fifteenth of January, with bare-root roses shipping from the first week of March and potted plants through May. 6,400 verified customer reviews, averaging 4.93 out of 5.
Photographed at the Woodburn farm, October 2024.
Still family.
Still hand-grafted.
Still Hisako.
My mother grafted her first seven roses when she was twenty-nine, in a shed made of packing crates, with a borrowed pickup and a Multnomah County Library card. I took the gate at twenty-nine too. I am not my mother — I am, by temperament, a more cautious grafter than she was, and I keep a tighter ledger — but I share her one unbending rule: nothing leaves this farm that was not grafted by a person whose name is on our payroll.
We have grown, in forty-seven years, from a hayfield to fourteen acres; from seven cuttings to 312 cultivars; from a single ad in Organic Gardening to a team of nine master grafters with an average of twenty-two years of experience apiece. We have not grown in one respect: we still graft every plant by hand, on Dr. Huey rootstock, in the same lean-to my mother built — we have just added a second lean-to beside it.
If you order a rose from Hisako this spring, one of nine pairs of hands will have grafted it. Their names are below. You can ask for them by name, and we will tell you which one grafted your plant. That is, I think, the only promise worth keeping.
— Midori Tanaka-Ross, Steward
Nine master grafters.
198 combined seasons of handwork.
Each of the nine master grafters on our team has been grafting roses by hand for an average of twenty-two years. Below, four of the longest-tenured — including the two who train the next generation, and the one who grafted the most plants in the 2024 shipping season.
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No. 01 · Master GrafterKenji Watanabe
Lead Grafter · 34 years on the team
Specialty: Old European roses — Alba, Gallica, Damask, and the once-blooming Moss crosses. Trains the next generation of grafters alongside Midori. Grafting knife retired, 2021; replaced, on Kenji's insistence, by an identical Japanese carbon-steel blade from the same maker in Sakai.
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No. 02 · Master GrafterElena Cruz
Whip-and-Tongue Lead · 28 years on the team
Specialty: David Austin-style English roses and the seven Keisei cultivars under exclusive U.S. license. Trained under Hisako from 1997; took over the bench for the Keisei license in 2003. Personally grafted 4,140 plants in the 2024 shipping season — the most of any grafter on the team.
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No. 03 · Master GrafterTheo Lindqvist
Bench Grafter · 19 years on the team
Specialty: Climbing and rambling cultivars, and the long-cane grafts required for the bare-root climbing-rose program. Came to the farm from a background in orchard propagation in Hood River. Quietly responsible for the most uniform callus rates on the bench, year over year.
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No. 04 · Master GrafterAdaeze Obi
T-Budding Lead · 12 years on the team
Specialty: T-budding on Dr. Huey rootstock for the mass-production cultivars, and the only grafter on the team permitted to handle the seven Japanese Keisei cultivars during the eight-to-twelve-week custom-graft lead window. Joined the team at twenty-three, after a degree in horticultural science from Oregon State.
— and five more: Marguerite Dubois (23 yrs), Hiroshi Nakamura (17 yrs), Saoirse O'Connell (15 yrs), Daniel Park (8 yrs), and Wren Holloway, our newest master grafter, who joined the bench in 2024.
Shop the 2025 Collection