Even the most unschooled of vegetation observers know that you have your run-of-the-mill roses, shrubs and trees — and then you have those weird-looking plants that kind of look like they came from another planet.

When visiting the Napa Valley Ornamental Nursery on Fulton Lane, one is bound to see a generous number of the latter, including one family of plants that can be described best as “rocks giving birth to other rocks.”

The nursery’s proprietors, David and Susan Tiedemann, said keeping St. Helena’s only propagating nursery afloat during its first 11 years has been a team effort. Though their duties overlap, David is typically the logistics guy who schedules waterings and keeps all the equipment in working order, while Susan keeps the books, orders the seeds and keeps abreast of information on all the hottest plants.

“I always think of us as a combination,” said David Tiedemann. “The perfect song needs words and music.”

That teamwork is one of the results of the Tiedemanns’ 30 years of marriage; another is their 22-year-old daughter Jocelyn, who’s on her way to becoming a pilot and a flight instructor.

The Tiedemanns share both a St. Helena background and a love of the outdoors. After David was born at “the San,” now known as St. Helena Hospital, his parents brought him home to the same house the couple lives in today.

At the time his grandfather Paul operated a dairy at the end of Fulton Lane, and David had an appreciation for plants and animals from a young age. He studied horticulture at Napa Valley College and honed his skills working at the now-defunct Vintage Nursery.

His wife, known at the time as Susan Davey, grew up in old-town St. Helena, where she was responsible for taking care of the family’s lawn and rose bushes. She learned the finer points of gardening from an old Italian couple who lived down the street.

One day when David was working in a Main Street art gallery he nudged a friend of his, pointed to a young woman walking by, and announced that he was going to marry her. “My friend laughed at me,” he recalled. “A year later he was best man at our wedding.”

Started with hops

The couple bonded through their shared love of nature and all things relating to the outdoors, but for a long time they never considered starting a nursery. Indeed the nursery actually began, like so many good things, with the growing of hops.

In the 1990s, when David was cellarmaster at Domaine Chandon, he and Susan grew hops on bamboo trellises to shade some chicken coops they had at the time. They started selling the hops to florists, who often had to import hops from outside California.

Hops led to other plants, and by the time they got their nursery license in 1997 the Tiedemanns were growing a variety of plants at their Fulton Lane home, and had become mainstays at both the St. Helena and Calistoga Farmers Markets.

Unusual succulents

The Tiedemanns said they soon recognized a local need for exotic plants that can’t be found at large nurseries.  For example, the nursery’s Stevia or “sweet leaf,” not to be confused with the subject of the classic Black Sabbath ode, is a sugar substitute that makes a great addition to a cup of tea, but it’s not the kind of thing Target would stock in its nursery.

One of Susan’s tasks is to keep in contact with hybridizers and find out about all the new plants being created through cross-pollination.

As water conservation has become an increasingly hot topic, the Tiedemanns have made the sale of succulents — drought-tolerant plants, such as cacti, that store their own water — a central focus of their business.

A typical succulent tends to have an exotic, robust appearance and a colorful name such as tiger jaws or shark jaws. Joycelyn dubbed one such eye-catching specimen, “Dragon’s Breath.”

It’s the experimentation and hybridization that keep the work interesting, said Susan, like when she kept crossing the darkest “Black Prince” pansies she could find and came up with the blackest pansy imaginable.

Other new plants result from mutations, such as the “schizophrenic” canna that self-mutated from ordinary dark red canna. When the new flower appeared, the Tiedemanns reproduced it asexually by cutting it off from the main plant and transplanting it.

“I love mixing things up and seeing what you come up with,” she said.

But all that fun — and the family’s very livelihood — almost came to an end on the night of Dec. 31, 2005.

Flooded

David swears that flooding was never a problem on the property from the time his family bought it in the 1930s. He says all that changed in 1986 when a floodwall was built at Vineyard Valley Mobile Home Park without permits and started to cause water to back up to the Tiedemanns’ property, which is about a half-mile from the river.

Making the situation even more ironic is that David’s grandfather Paul was a vocal opponent of building Vineyard Valley Mobile Home Park at the confluence of two waterways, arguing that it would have flooding problems.

The Tiedemanns didn’t go to bed on New Year’s Eve. They stayed up all night huddled in front of their computer watching the level of the Napa River rise higher and higher.

When the sun rose the next morning the nursery had been devastated. Water — as deep as three feet — covered about 85 percent of the property. The house had been spared, but about two-thirds of the nursery’s inventory had to be thrown out.

David estimates the cost of the lost materials at $250,000, not including the loss of sales. None of the business’s three insurance policies kicked in. “We’ll never make up the financial loss,” he said.

No help from city

But the situation got even more aggravating as the city’s flood project moved forward. The Tiedemanns fear that the project will make them even more likely to flood, and say city officials have done little to allay their fears.

“This has been the biggest injustice I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime,” said David. “They had an opportunity to make things better, but they chose to make things worse.”

The city council has agreed that Fulton Lane flood protection is a priority, but it’s not as high on the list as the current project, which is itself in continual financial straits.

That bad blood is the reason Susan won’t be found at the St. Helena Farmers Market this year. She said she’s sticking to the Calistoga Farmers Market because being around certain St. Helena officials is too emotional.

But the nursery has survived and thrived, even with the recent decline in the construction industry that’s hurt some landscaping firms.

Maybe that’s because there will always be an interest in plants like the bat-pollinated white nights, the alien-looking desert coral, good old-fashioned hydrangeas, and a number of other plants at the Napa Valley Ornamental Nursery that don’t even have official names and have been the surprising results of hybridization.

“I think that’s what I enjoy most,” David said. “The discovery."

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