Trees chosenthe way art is.
Olive A Dream is a by-appointment specimen nursery in Rainbow, California — a yard full of trees that took a century to become themselves.
Rick
The nursery is Rick's. He selects every tree in it himself, and he's the one who picks up the phone.
That's deliberate. A specimen tree isn't a catalog item — it's a single object with a front, a lean, a set of hollows and a history. Choosing one is a conversation, usually standing in front of it, usually longer than you'd expect.
So there's no showroom and no walk-in hours. You call, Rick sets a time, and the two of you walk the rows.
Call Rick · (760) 695-7444
Rainbow, California — where the yard is.
Rainbow sits in the hills above Fallbrook, in northern San Diego County — mild, dry, and about as close to a Mediterranean climate as California gets.
It's a good place to hold old olives. They root well here, they hold their silver, and they move to a job site anywhere in the state without a fuss.
What's in the yard changes constantly — specimens come and go. That's the reason to come see it rather than scroll it.
A tree is the only sculpture that keeps working.
Buy a piece for a courtyard and it is finished the day it arrives. Plant an old olive there and it keeps going — new growth, deeper shade, different light every hour of the day.
That's how we treat what's in the yard. Trees are selected for form before anything else: the twist of the trunk, the negative space in the canopy, the way the base spreads into the soil. Everything else — health, root ball, transport — is craft in service of that.
It's also why the planters, the stone and the setting belong in the same conversation. A specimen doesn't stand alone. It stands in something.