Online Nurseries 2000 - Foliage Gardens

It's that time of year again! Spring is right around the corner for many of us - for those in the southern parts of the US, it's actually begun. Even those in the north, who have at least two more months to wait, can feel the gardening juices stirring. Tempting catalogs are coming in the door and online nurseries are updating their web sites with the new 2000 listings. It's also time to tell you about more mailorder nurseries who are online with marvelous plants to feed our gardener's cravings.

Foliage Gardens, operated by Sue and Harry Olsen, is a nursery that all shade gardeners should know about. They have two main specialties - hardy native and exotic ferns and Japanese maple cultivars - with Kousa dogwood (Cornus kousa) cultivar offerings on occasion.

Foliage Gardens
2003 128th Ave. SE
Bellevue, WA 98005
(425) 747-2998
email: Foliageg@juno.com
Note This phone number is also Sue and Harry's home. Please keep in mind they operate on Pacific Coast time and don't call at some ungodly hour. They say email is the best way to reach them.

Both the print catalog and the web site provide a brief history of the nursery which began in in 1967 when Sue fell in love with the ethereally beautiful Dryopteris erythrosora (autumn fern - shown here with crosiers just unfurling) but couldn't find any plants, so she tried propagating them from spore and ended up with some three hundred sporlings. Now, Foliage Gardens is the oldest mailorder nursery for spore grown ferns in the US.

Sue is a founding member and past president of The Hardy Fern Foundation and currently edits their Quarterly publication. She's also had articles published in The American Horticultural Society's The American Gardener and Horticulture magazine. Although we've never met, I feel like I know her from her postings on the fern email list, fernet.

Harry, who began indulging his passion for Japanese maples upon retirement, has some of his maple photographs in Maples for Gardens : A Color Encyclopedia and he'll also have some in the upcoming revision of J. D. Vertree's Japanese Maples.