Maurice Horn’s ties to Japan go back to a visit when he was just 4 years old. Growing up in a military family, he lived in many locations, but Japan had a special pull. He spent a year there for his undergraduate studies and returned to Tokyo to obtain his master’s degree. It was in Japan that he first became aware of and fell in love with clematis, a favorite of gardeners, collectors and growers around the world.
Horn traces his interest in clematis back to that visit in 1954 when he saw an image of a purple flower on the lid of a small wooden box in Japan. The purple flower turned out to be a clematis.
“That image was molded into my brain,” said the co-owner of the popular Joy Creek Nursery in Scappoose for almost 30 years before retiring in 2021. “The irony of this was that purple clematis were introduced to Japan from the West.”…