TRIPLE OAKS NURSERY & HERB GARDEN
P.O. Box 385, 2359 S. Delsea Drive, Franklinville, NJ 08322
(856) 694-4272; fax (856) 694-0603
www.tripleoaks.com; e-mail greatplants@tripleoaks.com
Tom and Lorraine Kiefer

Perennials, herbs, roses, native wildlife plants, grasses, flowering trees and shrubs, shade trees. Family-run teaching nursery. Open year-round, September through December, weekdays, 9 to 7, Saturday, 9 to 5, and Sunday, 10 to 4. Hours may vary in season. No printed catalog. Catalog on Web site. Mail order. Online store. Shipping in February, March, and June. Planting service. Lectures, classes, and teas. Articles and recipes on Web site. Herb Festival in June. Gift shop. Florist. Recipes. Display gardens. Seasonal items. Visitors welcome.

Triple Oaks Nursery & Herb Garden is a family-operated garden center in South Jersey, founded in 1976 by Ted and Lorraine Kiefer on their 10-acre property. Two Kiefer sons now help run Triple Oaks and its Web site, and a third son operates a wholesale nursery that supplies many of its plants. The Kiefers are an energetic family of free spirits who have thrown themselves headlong into horticulture. Today, they also grow and sell the largest selection of retail plant material in the Delaware Valley region.

Triple Oaks is an atmospheric “teaching nursery” with everything imaginable for gardeners. Despite an ambitious plant list and A-level horticulture, it presents itself as homey and personal. Bountiful in May, frazzled in August, and fragrant at Christmas, it functions as an outstanding gardeners’ resource year-round.

The Kiefers pride themselves on offering unusual plants. A lengthy tree list contains—by way of example—exceptional magnolias, dogwoods, and hardy camellias; Amur maakia; hardy rubber tree; rare maples; and a large-flowered snowdrop-tree (Halesia diptera var. ‘Magnaflora’). The fine conifers include cedar-of-Lebanon and Serbian spruce. Among shrubs, long-stalk holly (Ilex pedunculosa) is the kind of shrub—glossy, fruitful, self-grooming, and attractive to birds—signifying a nursery that’s paying attention. Many handsome oaks are native to the South Jersey terrain. A beloved Delaware-valley tree, known as "granny greybeard” and “cole-slaw tree” (Chionanthus virginicus), is emblematic of Triple Oaks’ ecological interests.

Among the many perennials, herbs are prominent. Diverse ornamental grasses and dry-land prairie flowers give gardeners beset with deer and drought something to work with. All the nursery’s holdings are listed on the Web site along with helpful availability lists.

The Kiefers have a fascination with growing tropical and desert plants not normally attempted in the area. Their most popular plant is a 15-foot hardy fiber banana (Muso basjoo). Only the truly plant-crazed would try to get a banana plant to bloom, fruit, and winter over in New Jersey. Specimens the Kiefers planted on-site not only survive but produce bananas. Other hot-climate triumphs are needle palm, dwarf palmetto, cactus, and agave (the source of tequila).

Of all Triple Oak’s amenities, its education program is perhaps the most valuable. Lorraine Kiefer is founder and chairman of the South Jersey Unit of Herb Society of America and a noted expert on culinary herbs. She’s also a tireless teacher, lecturer, and garden writer who produces a regular garden column for local newspapers; contributes articles to garden magazines; and wrote a chapter in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Gardening for Fragrance. More than 100 of her gardening-related articles are posted on the nursery’s Web site.

Keifer lectures regularly at Triple Oaks—as well as at the Philadelphia Flower Show—on such topics as kitchen gardening, flower arranging, herbal history, and fragrant plants. She’s a talented cook who shares family recipes on the Web site, including beet soup and potato donuts. Like Martha Stewart, she learned how to make pisanki (traditional hand-painted Easter eggs) from her Polish grandmother. A $25 fee for the pisanki class includes eggs, dyes, beeswax, instruction, and a round of egg folklore.

Triple Oaks’ cozy garden shop is located in a creaky Swiss-style chalet fronting the entry drive. Mood music, wind chimes, and candle scents suggest a gypsy tearoom (the nursery holds teas). The shop sells dried herbs, horticulture books, folk crafts, and Polish knickknacks such as lamb butter molds. There’s also a florist and space for tropical houseplants. Frankincense and myrrh plants are sold here during the holidays.

Did we mention the Herb Weekend Festival, with herb talks and walks? Fall Harvest Weekend Festival? Christmas Open House? Landscape design and planting services? The online garden shop? Triple Oaks has such a rich density of activities, plants, and gardening gear, it’s easy to feel a little overwhelmed.

For respite, be sure to penetrate the garden paths that ribbon behind the nursery near the Kiefers’ home and chicken coop. Raffish plantings bordering a creek are worth viewing for their experimental beds of hardy bananas and noisy towering grasses. The creek is a tributary to the Maurice River, a “wild and scenic” river of brown cedar water that broadens, southward, into the state’s largest delta of wild rice plants and bird sanctuary.

Directions: From the Philadelphia area, take Route I-295 to exit 26 onto Route 42 south, or alternatively, take the Ben Franklin or Walt Whitman Bridge onto Route 676 south and turn onto Route 42 south. Turn onto Route 55 south, take exit 43, turn left off the ramp onto Little Mill Road, and turn right at the light onto Route 47/Delsea Drive; the nursery is 2.5 miles on the right. From Trenton, take Route I-295 south toward Philadelphia; where the road forks, bear right onto Route 42 south, and follow directions above. The Web site has further directions.

Nearby attractions: Country Rose Restaurant, Dutch Neck Village, 97 Trench Road, Bridgeton, NJ (856-455-9294), makes great pie.
Related source: Rivendell Nursery, 320 Strathem’s Neck Road, P.O. Box 82, Greenwich, NJ 08323 (856-453-0708; www.rivendellnursery.com), is Ted Kiefer’s 260-acre wholesale production nursery for premium woody plants; they’re so good that one botanical garden director suggested, “Send your landscaper.”

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