ABOUT US:
California Flora Nursery co-owners
Sherrie Althouse and Phil Van Soelen.
We opened California Flora Nursery for business in 1981 as a native plant nursery. We had previously worked together running Circuit Riders' revegetation nursery. California Flora Nursery, while not a revegetation nursery, emphasizes natives, relatively small container sizes, in-house propagation, and species and genetic diversity. Most of the non-natives we grow are well adapted to our Mediterranean climate.
Awards received include the 2002 Annual Award from the California Horticultural Society for contributions to California horticulture, and the Xeriscape Award of Excellence, 1988, from the Sonoma County Water Agency in appreciation of our plant materials.
We are both past presidents of the Milo Baker (Sonoma County) Chapter of the California Native Plant Society. We share a deep love and affinity for the native flora and work to propagate it by seed and cuttings to make local selections available to the wider public.
Co-owners Sherrie Althouse and Phil Van Soelen.
Articles:
Running a Nursery by Phil Van Soelen (pdf version)
Reprinted from "Manzanita, a quarterly publication of the Friends
of the Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Vol. 11 No.1, Spring 2007"
"Great American nurseries remodel our gardens simply through the plants they introduce. Many of these businesses are small and idiosyncratic, the brain-children of people with odd and original visions of how gardens should be."
-Mac Griswold
October 1997 Garden Design Magazine
