If you’ve bought a plant from us in the last few years, there’s a good chance it spent its early life in a greenhouse out in Boring, Oregon, about twenty-five minutes east of Portland, under the care of two brothers who will absolutely, correctly point out that their town’s name is the best joke in the whole business and they never get tired of it.
Tom and Ray Delgado, and a greenhouse that used to be a Christmas tree farm
Cascade Foliage started as a side operation on land that had grown Christmas trees for two generations before Tom and Ray took it over from their father in the early 2000s. Tom handles the growing side — propagation, soil recipes, the slow, patient work of nursing a Monstera Albo cutting into something sellable. Ray handles everything else: logistics, the loading dock, the relationships with the dozen or so small shops around the metro area that Cascade Foliage supplies. Between the two of them, they’ll tell you, they’ve got exactly one useful skill set split cleanly down the middle.
We started working with Cascade Foliage not long after we opened, when Marisol was still sourcing from a handful of larger wholesale operations and finding the plants arrived healthy but somehow generic — perfectly fine, uniformly grown, indistinguishable from what any other shop in town was selling. A visit out to Boring changed that. Tom was somewhat famously willing to talk for twenty straight minutes about soil drainage rates for aroids specifically, and it was clear within about five minutes of walking the greenhouses that these were growers, not just a supplier.
Why we still drive out there
Most of what fills our shelves — the Golden Pothos, the Snake Plant ‘Laurentii’, the trays of Zebra Haworthia, and yes, the increasingly in-demand Monstera Albo and Philodendron Pink Princess in our Rare Finds section — comes from Cascade Foliage’s greenhouses. A few things keep us coming back rather than ordering from a bigger, cheaper operation:
- Slow-grown, not rushed. Tom’s philosophy is that a plant pushed to sellable size too fast never quite recovers its resilience. Cascade Foliage’s growing cycles run longer than a lot of wholesale operations, and the plants show it in root health once they’re home with a customer.
- No plant mills. This matters to us more than almost anything else. Cascade Foliage is a real, small operation — a handful of employees, greenhouses you can walk end to end in an afternoon — not a mass-production facility churning out identical stock by the tens of thousands.
- They tell us when to say no. More than once, Ray has called ahead of a big order to say a particular batch isn’t where it should be yet and we should wait two more weeks. A supplier who’ll turn down an order to protect plant quality is rare, and worth keeping.
A morning at the greenhouse
Walking through Cascade Foliage’s growing houses is something like walking through a library organized by mood rather than alphabet — a whole bay of Ferns kept humid and shaded, a sun-drenched corner of Echeveria and Aloe that Tom calls “the desert room” without a trace of irony, and a locked-ish back greenhouse where the variegated rarities get grown slowly and watched closely, since a Monstera Albo cutting represents a lot more patience per plant than a flat of Pothos does.
Ray still does most of the deliveries himself, in a truck that’s older than some of our regular customers, and he’ll usually stick around the shop for a few minutes trading notes on what’s selling and what customers keep asking for. It’s a genuinely small, genuinely local supply chain, running the twenty-five minutes between Boring and Hawthorne Boulevard, and we think you can tell the difference on your windowsill.