About Us

Landscape Design

We offer landscape design services by Rebecca Chance BFA, MLA: landscapes for living, sensitive to individual, style, culture, and environment.

Offering:
-consultation
-site design
-planting plans
-installation oversight

Bio for Leonard Foltz and Fred Weisensee

Nursery Hours:

We are open March 1st to October 31st Tuesday through Saturday, 9 AM to 5 PM and Sundays 10 - 4. Mondays we are closed for shipping. We are flexible so please call if another day or time works better for you and we'll be happy to make arrangements. From November 1st to February 29th we are open by appointment only. Phone 503.838.6058.

Fred and Leonard are unrepentant plant addicts who always on the lookout for their next botanical fix. Fred can trace the genetic roots of his addiction to his Grandma who had a huge vegetable garden and loved flowers of every kind. But it took a Hardy Plant winter lecture by Wayne Winterrowd and Joe Eck years ago on a balmy February day in Portland to ignite his unrequited addiction. Their eloquent passion for ornamental gardening and keen sense of design awakened a whole new world to him.

It has been this passion for plants that in August of 1995 led Fred and Leonard to move back to Fred's boyhood farm and start Dancing Oaks Nursery. Fred's horticultural knowledge and experience has come through hands on building of the Nursery and its gardens, visiting gardens far and near, and writing hundred of plant labels!

Fred and Leonard's addiction has become so advanced that their idea of a novel is a plant catalog, seed list, or new monotype from Timber Press. Vacations, when they can extract themselves from the nursery, are weekend escapes to nurseries and hiking trails or frantic plant expeditions to South Africa or Chile for a few weeks in the off season. In his spare time Fred squeezes in a full time Internal Medicine practice in Corvallis.

Leonard continues to be struck without warning by insatiable desires to know and collect various groups of plants and compare their characteristics and to choose his favorites. His horticultural bent started at an early age while growing up on the family century farm in the Cascade foothills of Jordan in Oregon's Willamette Valley. In grade school his idea of wild was some vegetable novelties from Gurney's seed catalog. It's been a long, slippery slope (and more expensive habit) since then. After studying Philosophy he began working for a grafted ornamentals wholesale nursery in Canby where he worked for nine years. He is grateful for the handful of courses in plant ID and propagation at Clackamas and Chemeketa Community Colleges. Leonard devotes all his time at the nursery tending to the needs of the varied offspring.

Fred and Leonard are members of many plant societies (we are who we hang out with) near and far.

The Nursery

Dancing Oaks Nursery is nestled in the foothills of the coast range in the central Willamette Valley. The nursery has an established display garden where you can see more mature plant specimens, plantings designed to accent attractive characteristics, and beds which illustrate suitable companion plants. Dancing Oaks Nursery grows unusual trees, shrubs and perennials garnered from all corners of the world. We have carefully selected these plants for their unique characteristics and believe that they merit cultivation and appreciation in Northwest gardens. When possible in the off season, we enjoy traveling to Southern hemisphere countries such as South Africa and Chile and the offerings at the nursery reflect this interest. In the heart of the garden is the Pavilion that serves as a gathering place for classes, receptions and the annual Summer Garden Festival, and Music Festival. During the fair weather season the Pavilion is available for rent to medium sized groups.

In concert with the plants in the garden are water features, xeric gardens, metal sculptures created by local artists, a vine covered cedar pergola, hand made glass art and urns & pots for garden ornaments. Many of these pieces are for sale to accent your garden.

Early spring is a wonderful time to visit the nursery with thousands of bulbs and many varieties of daffodils blooming. We welcome visitors to the nursery and look forward to sharing our enthusiasm for plants with you. We are very fortunate to have a dedicated, knowledgeable & fun team that make Dancing Oaks Nursery, Inc. possible. For them and their hours of sharing their talents & gifts, Fred and I are very grateful. If you visit, you will likely be greeted by one of our Maine Coon cats looking for a few strokes & a kind word.

We are members of International Plant Propagators Society, The Oregon Association of Nurseries, The Royal Horticultural Society, North American Rock Garden Society, Oregon Hardy Plant Society and the Salem Hardy Plant Society. We would highly recommend membership in any of these organizations for great first hand information about various species, seed exchanges, seminars, and programs.