JUDITH JONES is at heart a collector — of knowledge, objects, and, luckily for many Northwest gardeners, of ferns. As you approach the hoop house on her Gold Bar acreage, classical music pours out the door, and sleek gray cats ("three sisters and a brother — you can't break up a set") wind themselves around post and potting bench. The big log house, where Jones uses the dining-room table to keep the books for her Fancy Fronds Nursery business, is filled with antiquities and curiosities, just as the hoop house is packed with an amazing variety of ferns with botanical names that Jones can reel off from memory, along with their tempting attributes.

Jones grew up in Yuma, Ariz., in a family of doctors, which may be why scientific names come so effortlessly. Her early passions were music, literature and drama, but she began identifying birds and plants by their Latin names on childhood excursions with her mother, a life-long birder.

Son Felix sits among the ferns at the front of the cabin, flanked by a pair of winged griffins.

Jones moved to Seattle to study children's theater at the University of Washington. For her final science credit, she took a class in botany (the only academic training she has in her subject) and ran across a little book by British social historian David Elliston Allen called "The Victorian Fern Craze: A History of Pteridomania."

"You read this and you just want the plants. It started my passion and that book is why I'm a grower," Jones says. She lived in an old house on Queen Anne at the time, Victorian enough to be a perfect setting for indoor ferns, which proved to be the thin edge of the wedge on Jones' slide into fulltime pteridomania (pteridology is the branch of botany dealing with ferns). She describes it as being sucked in by fern history and being spit out as a dedicated grower.

Victoriana is a natural for Jones, as the Victorians were great collectors, and she grew up as a self-described pack rat. Family trips to the dump meant coming home with more than they took. Now her log home is surrounded by gargoyles, giant turtle shells salvaged from the dump, and old grave stones from one of her always surprising display gardens at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show. Jones also loves the fact that the Victorians, in addition to compiling vast collections, wrote everything down ("they weren't sidetracked by television or the movies"). Jones has collected a library full of wonderful accounts of ferns. With the help of these references, she is able to figure out if she has bred some new kind of fern, or if the Victorians already grew it and she can simply use the name they had already given it.

The tree fern Dicksonia squarrosa thrives at the Fancy Fronds hoop house in Gold Bar, growing up to form a canopy over Judith Jones as she waters her wide selection of ferns.

Jones teamed up with local landscaper Torbin Barford, and over the course of the 1980s she moved her ferns from the 15-by-24-foot glass house in her Queen Anne backyard to Barford's greenhouses in Bothell. "I'd make more ferns, and he'd put up another greenhouse," she laughs. She was in demand as a lecturer and began to teach classes. When she showed slides of ferns, people wanted to buy them.

The Jones' log cabin is decorated inside and out with an assortment of gargoyles and found objects. A rusty old iron table top hangs on the front porch, with a squishy rubber gargoyle head peering out in greeting.

Jones lectures internationally for botanic gardens and plant societies, including Chicago Botanic Garden, Van Dusen Gardens in Vancouver, B.C., the Imperial College in London, and Harvard.

"It took awhile to move gardeners beyond maidenhair and sword ferns, but once you expose people to the incredible palette of ferns, they love it," she says.

Plants have become a family enterprise. Jones's daughter Daphne just completed her degree in herbology and plans to pursue naturopathic medicine. Her teenage son Felix helps in the greenhouse, as well as working with tractor and chainsaw to clear elderberries and junipers for new gardens around the Gold Bar property.

The front porch of the cabin holds a still life of found and collected objects: hand-fired chimney pots from the Netherlands, old baskets, tools and "anything we can drag home," according to Jones.

Jones describes growing ferns as a little like raising teenagers. "All you can do is provide light and water and hover, and they do it all by themselves," she says.

Jones isn't likely to be cured of pteridomania anytime soon. "There are 12,000 species in the world, depending on if you're a lumper or a splitter," she explains. "And fern sex is just so fascinating, really incredibly creative — they've had millennia in which to perfect it."

Valerie Easton is a horticultural librarian and writes about plants and gardens for Pacific Northwest magazine. Her e-mail address is vjeaston@aol.com. Jimi Lott is a Seattle Times staff photographer.