VAA Garden Tour Preview #6: the Richard and Kathleen Farner Garden on Maury Island

Past foxglove-lined lanes, winding past hill and dale and ferns and forest and more ferns and more forest until you wonder if you’re lost, you’ll eventually wind up at the farthest-most garden on this year’s tour.

It’s worth the trip.

Personally, I find roses irresistible. I adore getting my nose right up inside them, my eyes focused on that center roundness of the collective petals unfurling. If this means I look like a cross-eyed bee when appreciating roses, SO BE IT!

If you’re like me in adoring the rose, then you’ll love this garden. Richard and Kathleen Farner, with the help of architect John Thomas AIA, have created an exquisite courtyard garden that shelters around 70 hybrid teas, floribundas, and David Austin roses. 

The garden actually started with a pair of Mt. Fuji cherry trees to cut the brightness of sunset glare into their house. John Thomas suggested this answer to their problem and added “Richard, considering your age, get the biggest trees you can.” Richard told me, “Kathy and I remain very grateful for his wisdom and candor, as the big trees have proven to be exactly what we needed.”

Richard had grown roses in Tacoma before, as Kathleen had given him roses bushes on his 50th birthday. But they were too well established to move with them to Maury Island. So, on his 60th birthday, she presented him with several that are now growing on the outside/south side of the rose garden. There you will find familiar roses such as ‘Mr. Lincoln,’ ‘Fragrant Cloud,’ ‘Crimson Bouquet’, and the big, bumptious ‘Dolly Parton.’  Rich marks each plant with a sign indicating name, type, breeder, and year of introduction; his flyer does as well: pick it up from the docents at the entrance.

One of his favorite roses, ‘Karen Blixen’, was thick with buds in its corner when I visited Monday. “It’s a pure white, no yellow or pink tones at all.” Next to it, a golden ‘Julia Child’. He entertains some classy ladies in here.

…’Fragrant Cloud’, ‘Fragrant Hour’, ‘Fragrant Wave’… This is definitely a Scented Garden. The volunteer docents arrived during my visit and exclaimed at the scent when they walked in. Fragrance seems to be a Farner priority: they also grow sweet peas along the garage south-facing wall (though they’re struggling this year, like all peas) and white carnations in the perennial bed. Richard said, “That way, if we pick a bouquet with roses that don’t have any scent, we can put a few sweet peas or carnations in and still have a nice perfume.”

Kathleen tends to the big square vegie bed, loaded up with nice-looking lettuce heads grown from Langley Fine Gardens’ transplants. She’s also responsible for the colorful plantings in the metal horse troughs outside their living room windows. 

The Farners also have a little pond with waterfall, created by Tim Holtschlag and “MarkthePondGuy.com”—”yes, that’s how he’s known.” And there are sculptures, walks… but you’ll be drawn back to the roses, I’m sure of it.

Not many folks out here cultivate these highly refined roses, the Hybrid Teas and Floribundas. They need spraying and watering, rose food and fencing, annual and after-bloom pruning, and yes Richard does all that for his roses. And he started with heaps of compost, which he renews every year.
But this garden might make you think all the work could be worth it. If that’s a possibility for you—you know who you are!—I suggest taking in this garden in the morning, then sticking around for the 1pm lecture by Cheryl Prescott:  “For the Love of the Rose.” 

Cheryl is a Consulting Rosarian and Master Gardener. She currently grows 350 roses of all types. She will present information on rose care, including watering, fertilizing, pruning the various types and protecting roses from year-round forces of nature. The talk will last an hour.

Here’s Richard with ‘Fragrant Cloud.’  On the left, the floribunda pink climber ‘Dream Weaver’, which is planted around both entrances. 

You’ll find this this garden ‘Sheer Magic’: the roses will leave you “Spellbound” and “Over the Moon.” So come enjoy the “Radiant Perfume” of this garden and give “Honor” to the man and wife who created it. That is, if you don’t get all “Topsy-Turvy” driving here!

Elegant, barely-in-check abundance—that’s what you see in Cynthia Johnson’s garden. Once planted in strawberries and now in lavender rows, Cynthia Johnson’s acreage is kept visitor-worthy (yes, with help!) for weddings and summer events. At least during the summer months, Fox Farm may be Vashon’s premiere stroll garden.

I did one of my first “Labor of Love” weeding sessions here about ten years ago. Back then, Cynthia and I weeded the kitchen garden’s raised beds and cleaned up the grass edging; the islands of roses and shrubs were young then, the outer pergola just built and the inner pergola still a dream. Since then (and in addition to many other landscaping projects) she installed a field of lavender and joined the Lavender Sisters and Cathy MacNeal in putting on the Vashon Lavender Festival. And the garden has been on the Garden Tour before, in 2004. But unless you’ve been at those events, you haven’t seen this garden, because the roadside pergola fence intrigues but does not reveal what’s inside to the drive-by curious.

The pergolas, both roadside and interior, give this garden Romance with a capital R. They are planted in the rose ‘Cecile Brunner’,  also known as the “Sweetheart rose,” a climbing sport of the bush polyantha rose. Cynthia’s plants demonstrate this rose’s reputation for growing VERY tall: these pergolas are merely steadying plants that want to be trees. Walking under THIS pergola, you won’t be batting away limp rose brambles—no, the roses rise like a geyser through the inner pergola and arch over slightly less large roses, the bluish-leafed Rosa Glauca with its simple, cherry-red blooms. 

Remembering other, shorter roses from before, I ask Cynthia why only climbers. She replied, “We did have carpet roses for awhile, but they took a lot of work to keep looking good.  The farm is organic, and I didn’t think I could keep hybrid Teas looking good without sprays, so we have stuck with Rosa glauca, Rosa rugosa, and climbers.” 

Between the two pergolas is a small lawn with apple trees and perennials. I find interesting ground covers here: by the house a Toothed Saxifrage (I also saw this at the Thompson/Bruno garden and didn’t know what it was: thanks to Cynthia for ID’ing it) throwing up a small cloud of tiny white blossoms. Cynthia says this plant takes little care, and since the leaves are evergreen, it would make a good all-year ground cover. There’s a brick-laid path leading out of the pergola toward the kitchen garden that also has another good ground cover used as edging: muguet des bois, commonly known as lily of the valley. Again, here’s another symbol of affection: muguet sprigs, so highly fragrant, are given on May Day in France to friends as a token of friendship. 

The kitchen garden is one of Cynthia’s first plantings, and it’s a mixed garden full of vegies, herbs, berries, and flowers. You may first notice a boldly variegated perennial; Cynthia says it is “Scrophularia auricula var. variegata.  It is a great plant that will also grow in dry shade and is a workhorse returning every year, needing no care.  Soon it will have tiny burgundy flowers that the hummingbirds love.  It is next to a monkshood called Aconitum ‘ivorine’.  I got the Aconitum  from a seed exchange. I love it because it blooms relatively early when you need it!” 

Around the central garden shed—which doubles as a lavender drying shed after the harvest—I notice one sign of this garden’s maturity: intermingling perennials. The deep-blue flowers of a hardy geranium—possibly ‘Johnson’s Blue’?—hold aloft from foliage mingling with lady’s mantle and variegated solomon’s seal. In a mature garden every few years, you have to decide whether to go with the tangled look or dig out the jungle to impose newness and order. Here, the jungle is a small one, but back at the entrance island, Cynthia has opened up some of the rosa rugosas v. rosea to make a space for a planting of mountain laurel. 

If you steer northeast, you’ll find more beds of perennials, a brand-new bed for rock roses, a blueberry cage, and finally a cutting garden with fern-leaf yarrow, delphiniums, and ornamental allium. Later it will be planted with sunflowers and dahlias, planted I suspect will be going into service at the weddings and events scheduled after the Garden Tour.

It’s a Big Sky garden, this home-spread cultivated by Sally Fox and Steve Brown. It seems larger than five acres because its wide lawn and pastures cover Raecoma’s hill top, the tree-line receding because they’re slightly downhill. Borrowed views peek southeast into Kay White’s ten acres, while the paddocks of Fran O’Reilly’s riding school spread like chartreuse carpets south and west.

This is Maury Island horse country. Its soils are dry and gravelly, home to firs, madrones, and hazels—and the gardener’s nemesis, scotch broom. Sally used to train her horses next door at Fran’s, and when the gardening bug bit her in 2006, here is where she found the land—more than enough land—to pursue her passion.

“I never gardened before,” she told me as we met in her driveway roundabout last Thursday. “I grew up in the suburbs of the Northeast, and I thought it was a chore down there with cleaning bathrooms.” But now she’s a Master Gardener; last year, she was president of the garden club. She progressed from a garden 40 square feet to 10,000, from five plants brought from their Seattle house to hundreds, many given by friends who recognized the plant would be in better hands at Sally’s place. 

Her transformation began in Kyoto. A word-smith, she had a consulting gig in Japan, and twice she and Steve traveled to see Kyoto’s famous gardens. And as she writes beautifully and perceives her garden as a series of stories, I’ll let her tell it—

‘The gardens there were more beautiful than anything I had seen in my life. I remember standing mesmerized at the gardens of Nanzenji, trying to absorb the stunning variety of shades of green surrounding the pond. Flying back to Seattle, I lapsed into a daydream about fragrant peonies, colorful maples, and rich dirt. And then I had my epiphany. At 55, I decided to become a gardener.”

“Moving to Vashon, I was a seed that hit fertile soil and exploded. The palette I was given was far too big for my experience, time, or budget. I could have waited to know what I was doing, but I was possessed. I decided to make mistakes, learn by doing, and let myself dig.

“We brought 5 plants from our Seattle garden: a dogwood and four barberries. Without a plan to guide us, we plunked them in a section of grass outside our bedroom. Later, this would become the pond garden.

“Outside the back patio, I began digging to discover where I was living, digging to get my hands dirty, digging to find myself. I wanted flowers. I planted peonies. Starting without a plan, I have redone it several times… The temptation was too great for a beginning gardener.”

Getting a Handle on It All

So there was Sally, digging without a plan, and Steve with a new tractor “because he WANTED one.” At some point, sanity must have shouted from afar, because they hired landscape Bob Horsley to come out, have a look, draw them some battle plans so all their efforts would organize into a coherent homestead. One of the first things he said was, “You have to enlarge your driveway’s round-about.”

I met Sally here, and I’m guessing that’s where you, the garden tourist, will meet your garden docents and receive the map by Annie Brulé that Sally & Steve commissioned to help you navigate these wide-open spaces. You’ll walk up the gravel driveway past the gravel border on the left and the orchard on the right, toward a circle of mature firs underplanted with sword ferns, hellebores, luzula grass, and oregon grape. Notice the cobblestone edging created by Mark, the brother of the brother-in-law: a compulsively obsessive job that’s just plain beautiful.

left: woodland round-about; right: starflowers

Noticing the ample spacing between plants, I ask her how she keeps down weeds so successfully. “Cardboard and chips: I don’t know what I’d do without them.” She usually gets them from the local woodchipping trucks, but this year she’s found them harder to snag and thinks the reason is King County isn’t issuing as many roadside pruning jobs. “It’s steep competition for those chips, you know: Islanders watch for those trucks.”

The front entrance garden, dominated by a weeping blue atlas cedar and two huge pieris, was installed by the previous owner. Passing through the breezeway, the scale of the garden opens up, over paver patios and generously planted flower beds to the broad lawn and arboretum beyond. Poppies, lupine, bellflowers, and a few peonies bloom, easily seen up close from the chipped paths that quarter this bed.

“We didn’t do EXACTLY what Bob’s plan indicated, but it usually turned out we did something close,” said Sally. “For instance, Bob said we needed a focal point beyond the perennial beds; he wanted a birch grove, but we put in the writing cabin and that’s our focal point.”

She pulls me over to the pond, where I spot that red-flowering dogwood from Seattle. “Bob thought we needed another patio here surrounded by the crescent of flowers I was planting.” Instead, they installed a pond, the watercourse laid by DIG’s Ross Johnson, but most of the labor done by themselves. 

Casting off into the sea of lawn, we tour the young arboretum that includes a weeping katsura, red gum, korean fir, and tri-color beech. To the left is the entrance to the Maple Walk, inspired by a spectacular stump (now rather buried in greenery); when some of the blue spruce hedge was felled by winter, Sally found she could move in more sun-tolerant plants. 

Turn left and proceed toward the writer’s cabin, entering a hazel grove full of chartreuse plants: golden sambucus, golden red current, a golden heuchera or two, and an interestingly variegated columbine drooping with purple “bonnets.” By the cabin there’s a pair of adirondacks chairs where you can rest and regard the sunlight dappling onto the golden understory—surely a distraction to anyone trying to write!

Back onto the lawn and across southward, you’ll see into Kay White’s estate with its mature rhodies, viburnums, and Rainier Viewing Pavillion. Soon you’ll dip into the hazel-shaded lanes that Steve keeps clear with his tractor (though Sally says she uses it “almost as much!”). These groves of hazel, willow, and madrone were once choked with lamium, blackberry, broom, and dumploads of just “JUNK that people came and DROPPED HERE,” says Sally, still a little aghast. Once all that was trucked away, she dove in with cardboard and chips, adding to the natural understory of ferns, starflowers, and oxalis with Land Trust natives, more ferns and luzula grass, even strawberry plants. If the tour days are hot, cool off in the light shade of these walkways.

After about 200 yards of shady lane, we climbed up into the food production area: the vegie garden, berry patch, and orchard. The vegie garden reveals the soil that Sally’s up against: even with drip-lines and applications of horse manure, this “alderwood” soil remains dry, sandy, parched, and inhospitable. Nonetheless, the plants are plentiful and robust and a LOT bigger than mine (darn!)

The orchard is about four years old and includes cherries, pluots, apricot, apple, and an italian pear. To the west, you can see the barns and bins of the stables. Sally & Steve worked with King Conservation District on eco-friendly ways of managing water and compost, earning them a “Farm of Merit” award.

You’ve now come around full circle. The driveway border is her Beth Chatto-inspired gravel border; when I was there, the parahebe was blooming as purple-blue as any lavender. Check out how Steve cleverly covered an ugly gate with bamboo panels that fold back, two over two, wide enough for any dump-truck. 

And let Sally have the last word—

“The stories of our place come in many forms.  There is the story of the couple who built it and created the Front Garden – their last. There is our story about how we left Seattle and became gardeners when we bought the property five years ago.  There are the stories of the people who have worked here, either hired or colleagues and friends, who have sweated here, dirtied their hands, and strained their muscles.  There are the stories of fellow Master Gardeners and Garden Club friends who worked or toured the garden and always provided encouragement.

Paths. Edges. Changing levels. Make these badly, and your garden becomes a muddle, even a safety hazard. Make these well, and your garden provides a graceful navigation from one beauty-spot to another.

The Kate Thompson/Mary Bruno garden is a small one, and you may recall it from VAA Garden Tours past. But if you’re looking for ideas for paths, edgings, stairs, or how to manage the edge between the Natural and the Cultivated, you should come have a look around.

Gardeners in Cedarhurst deal with heavy shade, hard-pan, and a high water table constantly recharged by runoff from the hill south. Kate and her partner Mary have adapted to the situation by installing shade-loving perennials, readily-draining gravel paths, and a rain garden to catch some of that slope’s runoff.

Heavy rectangular pavers lead me toward the house and one of Kate’s favorite plants, a Cornus Controversa, its white edged leaves a brilliant contrast to the ground cover of pink-flowering Oxalis beneath. The rectangular path switches to circles—Chinese millstones acquired from importer David Smith—as the path turns the corner and heads to the studio. There, celandine poppies (Stylophorum diphyllum) glow yellow against the dark green darkness of bamboo, their seed capsules dangling (unlike the look-alike icelandic poppy whose seed capsules stand up like salt shakers at stem’s end).

Kate meets me near the studio and leads me to the top of the rain garden. “Here we have a high water table, so this isn’t so much a rain garden as a place for plants that can take wet feet.” I notice astilbes, bleeding hearts, spirea, ferns, ribbon grass, and—surprise—a euphorbia and a banana plant in a pot that, Kate says, “isn’t making it back much from this hard winter.”

Between rain garden and dark house is a gravel path with steel grills set down in the gravel; the stairs are made of the same grill material. “This is standard ADA grating, usually used on catwalks,” Kate told me. I LOVE them: these grids add texture, cadence, and geometry to a path that, if you left it in mere gravel, would be dull as ditch-water. And I’m on firm footing, not sinking into a pea gravel quagmire.

At the southwest corner of the house, a gorgeous clematis blooms. How well a dark house works in a woodland setting: its darkness lets the mid-greens of perennials and vines stand out, even glow.

To the left/west, we enjoy the towering rhodies, red, purple, and hot pink with bloom. Behind them, a startling pine tree pokes its head up: “That’s what we call the Dr. Seuss Tree—it’s really the neighbor’s Himalayan Pine.” Under these mature rhodies that came with the property, Kate has planted perennials and bulbs: tulips, geraniums, saxifrages, heucheras. In the sunnier areas, alliums and lilies are starting to come on.

At the top of the lawn, what they call “the small deck” hangs on the brim of the medium-high bank. Kate says, “This was once covered in ivy. I called the Noxious Weed department and told them it was holding the earth of the bank, so they told me to strip away just a foot at a time and replant immediately. So we’ve replanted with land trust natives like Vashon rose (probably Nootka rose), oceanspray, elderberry, salmonberry, that kind of thing.” To the right is the last survivor of three grapevines, hit hard by winter and deer. “We’re seeing deer eating things they never have, this year.” Deer fencing surrounds many of the plantings: they’ll remove it in time for the Garden Tour and hope for the best!

I find a little stairway leading down the hill: it’s their beach access. I ask about its construction—wood risers, gravel backfill with an imbedded paver, the tread’s edge covered with 1/4″ metal mesh. “No, I started to put in a stairway and found that already here, but buried. So I ‘released’ it and added the nose of metal mesh: it was pretty slippery when wet.”  The sides of the stairway are lined with a short wall of bricks, pavers, cobbles, whatever they could find. The area’s named “Blueberry Hill” after the berry plants they installed at the top.

A little vegetable area, fenced in against deer and cats, provides them with a little fresh produce. They had another rock wall installed outside its fence, topped with chives, marjoram, oregano. 

One of Kate’s proudest gardening accomplishments is only accessible if you squeeze back around the east side of the house (DO watch out for the overhang from the house deck). It’s her shade garden, and I DO MEAN SHADE: what with the overhanging bamboo backdrop and the two surrounding wings of the black house, you feel like you’ve entered a terrarium under a gro-lite.

Kate carefully lifts the large palm-shaped leaves of a May Apple to show me the actual “apples”—really its flowers, silken blood-red petals that curve into balls under the leaves. Here too are maidenhair and deer’s tongue ferns, ligularia, lamium, and hiding under all, “Jacks in the Pulpit.” Take a moment to look inside the dining room and notice the “Infinity” sculpture hanging like a chandelier over the dining table. It seems lit from within, but really that’s a gilding creating that warm glow.

I almost leave, but notice the entrance garden and flag Kate back to tell me about it. Here is another graceful transition: using the native bracken fern, huckleberry, and salal as a backdrop for introduced holly fern, deodar cedar, and ribbon grass. Across the entrance, another garden of natives—kinnickkinnick, meianthemum, and yellow flag iris—growing with carex pendula and a Loderi Rhodie. Standing glaring guard over all, a statue by Island artist Dean Hammer, “the spirit of the woodland,” says Kate, “though at first I found her a little scary.”

Perhaps it’s that Kate and Mary “inherited” this garden from their predecessor and so were able to spent time (and money) cleaning up the margins of an already-fine garden. However it came to be, this is an extremely well organized and sequenced garden that’s worth your time. June 25-26, VAA Garden Tour, tickets probably going fast.

November 16, 1929—Purchased approximately 19 acres waterfront from W. W. Prigg for $8000… Farm includes house, barn, 2 chicken houses, brooder houses for 1200 chicks, two ponies, 350 yearling hens, 480 pullets, and all tools and equipment. About 8 acres cleared part of which is in family orchard. 3-year-old Montmorency cherry orchard of 100 trees about to bear.”—from the Triplebrook Daybook of Robinson C. Jenner.

If you want to visit a place that holds loving memory of how Vashon places have changed over time, visit Triplebrook. It’s been a homestead, cherry orchard, egg farm, summer place, and B&B. Every stone, tree, plank, and plant touched by human hands has its story, saved for, and savored by, the next generation.

The farm was homesteaded in the 1890s by Jedediah Paige, whose oxen probably helped Paige clear the land—the barn was built for them. Paige went bankrupt, took his oxen and left; the land passed through an unknown number of hands until Mr. Jenner bought it in 1929. He kept a daily journal—

Dec. 7—Wired rafters of  house #1 to prevent pullets roosting on them. More wires needed. Paid 1.32 for 6 gal. gas. Rec’d check from Fox River for $46.01 for 131 doz. eggs. 

—and kept the daybook right through 1949, when he passed his log onto Athol Green, the present owner’s father.

This is Triplebrook Farm in 1949 as seen from uphill east. The montmorency cherry trees lined the highway, not tall enough to block the view of the white farmhouse; berries were grown across Westside Highway. 

You can no longer see the farm from uphill: firs, spruce, cedar, and coast redwood planted by Athol have grown to tremendous height along the highway, long shading out the pie cherry trees. But Hal Green told me he once picked those cherries when he was a kid, filling orders for his dad’s co-workers and making a little pocket change.

I met Molly and Hal Green last Thursday on what turned out to be our first hot afternoon. Molly met me at the end of the long shady drive that curves up to the house and onto the barn. “We renovated the house after we moved here in 2003, but it’s pretty much the same house as before,” she told me as we walked among the mixed border that she’s created around the house. It’s too early for all the David Austin roses, but today peonies, pacific coast irises, lewisia, and an unusual viburnum plicatum ‘Kern’s Pink’ are in vibrant bloom. 

Triplebrook seems arranged in three parts, like a dangling three-leaf clover. The house is the central lobe, to the west/left is the vegie garden and guest cottage, while to the right is the apple orchard, berry garden, and pond. At the top of the driveway (the central stem of my metaphor!) is the original red barn. Molly walks with me down the stone stairs toward the vegie garden, where we pause to admire the wisteria colonizing its west fence. Then it’s up a little rise and down another stone-lined path to the restored Brooder House.

Dec 10—Shipped 111 dozen eggs to Fox River. Weighed out grain allotments and found we had been feeding short. Will increase scratch food to 9# per 100 hens. One hen died. Counted pullets—464 in house #1, 7 in cull pen, and 1 in hospital. Total 472.

Molly tells me they cleaned and restored the brooder house, and it now sleeps five humans for weekend B&B visits. There’s a west deck (seen in the first photo) that looks out to Colvos Passage, and a deer-proof shrub border below the deck with azaleas, rhodies, dahlias, and hydrangea. 

Hal joins us near the red barn, now restored, that Jedediah Paige had built for his oxen. Hal is very proud of the white star and Triplebrook logo painted above the door in white: “I found the original sign that Mr. Jenner had made for this barn, and we repainted it under the star, up there. We hold events now in this barn: you should see the photo on the website of the night we had a banquet for Kaffe Fawcett, with all the quilts hanging from the rafters.”

Molly tells me that many of the replacement rafters came from wood salvaged by builder Peter Anderson after the 2008 windstorm. “And see that chestnut tree right there? (to the right of the barn, yes, a SPREADING chestnut tree just like the poem). “There was another to the left of the barn that up and died, but Peter cut it up and we got two coffeetables and a fireplace mantle out of it.”

Once we reach the berry garden, Molly begs off to go weed and let Hal tell me about “what’s really HIS project.” So Hal continues, “My dad had this wonderful berry garden when I was here around 1949-52. But over time it got eaten up by deer, cuz they didn’t have it fenced like we do, so when we moved here, I really wanted to restore the berry patch. But I also wanted HEIRLOOM VASHON BERRIES. When I joined the Fruit Club, I met Helen Brocard of Dockton, and she said “I’ve been growing Vashon heritage berries for years—I’ll give you some. So these are her loganberries.”

The patch also has boysenberries, marionberries, raspberries, strawberries, espaliered pears, and a robust row along the east of thornless blackberries called Chesterberries. Plenty of these berries came from Fairie Hill farm (now something else). I admired the way the strawberries provided a foundation fringe under the looped-over wired rows of caneberries. 

We stepped out to his greenhouse, which turned out a three-generation structure. His father had built the foundation upon the cracked concrete floor of some older building, but he’d roofed it with yellow corrugated plastic, “which I replaced with twin-wall.” Behind the greenhouse is one of Hal’s shade gardens: some hostas underneath a Thundering Plum, backed by a naturalized spread of buttercups and bluebells that make a beautiful transition zone “between the parts of the garden you take care of and the parts you just want to leave to nature.”

We leave the hot greenhouse for the shade of the old apple trees (Esopus Spitzenberg, Gravenstein, King) near what he was told was once a blacksmith’s shop, now as bright red as the barn. We loop around the south back of the house to visit yet more old apple trees, one sprawled over the ground like a giant dead spider. “Bob Norton advised me that I could just prop it off the ground and it would continue to bear for another ten years. The older I get, the more sympathetic I am to maintain the life of my old trees.”

We visit the old fish-pond under the cedars, his dad’s stone BBQ, the mason bee condo, and finally the big pond that his dad Athol created by damming up a brook. He points out the trees that his dad, a forester, planted along its rim; the tallest one, turns out, is a Coast Redwood; I identify it partly by its needle’s citrus scent when crushed.

Finally, coming full circle to the first thing I—and you—saw as I walked into the property, he explains the ENORMOUS tree trunk that lies like a giant’s bench across the lawn. “THAT is the bottom third of what Jim Biel called ‘the biggest tree that I ever took down.’ It was an old poplar, 140 feet high and getting rotten—and if it fell wrong, it would take out the utility lines for all this end of Westside Highway. So we asked Jim to think about it—that took him about a week—then he spent another week cutting it and hauling the chunks across the road to our other property. By the time he got to this bottom third lying here, he said, ‘Let’s just LEAVE IT.”

At that point, I almost trip across a cross-section of what I thought must be tree trunk, but Hal says, “Nope, that’s just from one of the LIMBS.” 

It was easy to spent two hours here. Triplebrook Farm has enjoyed over 110 years of human TLC, and it SHOWS. It’s yet another example of how folks move to the Island, fall in love with a place, start polishing it up, putting down roots, making it good as it’s been and all that it can be.

The first of six previews of the Vashon Allied Art’s gardens on tour this June 25-26. For information and tickets, visit the tour website by clicking here. 

The Rainbow Garden of Karen & Richard Person

From darkness to sunlight: that’s the way the Person Garden unfolds. And it’s rather like the hit I get off Karen Person, who I know from yoga and who teaches at our local grade school: she’s willowy tall with white-blonde hair and always a big smile that will light up your day.

Their garden is on a high bluff overlooking Dalco Passage, Pt. Defiance and, in the distance, the entrance to Gig Harbor. She’s seen dolphins at play, even gray whales, in the wide waters 140′ below. “This property was bought in the 20s by eight Swedish brothers from Skåne, via Tacoma,” she told me. “Uncle Karl had his house here, Uncle Emil over there, Uncle Vic’s over there. So my husband Richard, when he was a kid, spent his summers here.” 

Some of the plantings are original, but most was planted by Karen these last 20 years, starting with the front “Norwegian” garden. “There are three influences to this garden,” she explains, “Scandinavian, Chinese, and Welsh. This little boxwood hedge here?” she points at a little hedge encircling a massive white rhodie. “You see such little hedges all over Norway. As we walk through the front garden, she adds, “And boulders: they have rocky soil so they dig up the big ones and display them in their gardens. And you see rune stones with writing on them all over, too.”

I love the undulating hosta growing along the stone path, and the bugle lifting its purple blooms from the ground up. There’s a little tree that looks rather odd, then I realize: it’s a dogwood with a pink clematis top-knot. 

But Karen wants me to notice her new garden shed: a Norwegian “Hytta” (pronounced “HOOT-ta”), every plank face and cut end painted a different red, blue, or yellow. “That’s also traditional in Norway: they’re really into painting in bright colors.” 

Along the Tacoma side of the house stands an old wisteria arbor that guards her “Chinese” garden. Here, where Buddhas stand, the planting is spare, clean, focused on hardscape like stone path, planted pot, and “in every Chinese garden, there’s a red gate.” The wisteria jumped its space and established an offshoot, which Karen espaliered along a split-rail fence; another baby is blooming at the foot of a nearby fir tree, its intentions clear as it snakes a tendril counter-clockwise around the fir. Going up!

Here, pause a moment and look right into the house’s basement. Against the sliding glass doors, they’ve pushed a red Wedding Bed that they brought back from Shanghai. You don’t see one of those every day!

A new gravel path will walk you along the edge of their high bluff, planted in grasses, color lent by two adirondacks painted a truly GAUDY hot pink. When I asked what doesn’t grow well here, Karen said “Flowers. You know, with deer and this soil, it’s hard to get flowers. So I put as much color into pots and chairs and benches as I can, to compensate.” 

This same strategy, she claims, is key to the most unusual feature of the garden: seven tall door-lights painted in cobalt blue, lavender, coral, yellow, chartreuse, purple and turquoise. “When we were in Wales driving along the Irish Sea, it was a really gray, dreary day. Then we rounded the corner to the village of Portmeirion, and there were these row cottages painted in these wonderful colors, so welcoming. The whole town’s painted up like this.”

At the end of this cliff-side walk, you’ll all take turns sitting in the turquoise bench on the point overlooking the Sound. Richard Person will be making music on the back deck, and you can have a look-out for whales or dolphins.

And while you sit, consider the colors on display and whether they’d light up your garden. A coral bench, a pot of chartreuse, a shout-out of cherry red? Maybe, on these gray days, along our somber green pathways, we all could use a brush-load of Karen Person’s rainbow?

Who doesn’t love freebies? I’ve got two for you: one that will give you Insider Knowledge, and one that will give you Super-Human Strength.

Free soil tests from King Conservation District

King County’s Conservation District offers free soil tests to most county residents, including us. You can get up to five soil samples tested for pH, nitrogen, phosphate and potassium (NPK), sodium, magnesium, calcium, organic matter, and cation exchange capacity (measures how well your soil holds nutrients). Once you gather and mail in your samples (and the website tells you how to sample), the testing process takes about three weeks. 

Last year, I paid the University of Massachusetts’ Soil Testing Lab about $13-16 for a SINGLE test. This local program offers you FIVE FREE testing opportunities. You can sample across your property, compare one area to another, see all that composting, green manuring, and fertilizing vindicated as you compare your best garden bed to the virgin soil. 

So you soil geeks and mad composters: put quants on all your hard work, numbers to your labor, know what you got out there in the dirt. Get out the trowel and bucket and then click on these instructions for King Conservation District’s Soil Testing Program. 

(Thank you, Roberta, of King County’s BioSolids Management program).

Pull the Broom with the Land Trust’s Weed Wrenches

As I was helping set posts at the Food Bank Farm, I couldn’t help but notice the huge piles of scotch broom yanked out of the ground, thanks to a couple of bright orange tools on loan from the Land Trust. The landowner showed us how these bruisers work: a toothed clamp near ground level grabs hold of the broom’s trunk, then you pull back and leverage the nasty invader out. 

Tom Dean, executive director for the Land Trust, confirmed that they own four Weed Wrenches. And yes, the tools are freely loaned out to the community; you don’t HAVE to be a Land Trust member “though of course we would like everyone to become a member!” he said. 

Scotch Broom is a Class-C noxious weed: it’s recommended, not REQUIRED, that landowners control this particular weed. Broom thrives in sandy or gravelly soils with sun exposure: we’ve all seen how it takes over unused pasture-land, roadsides, driveways, even trails with a little sun exposure. Keep letting broom go to seed, and you’ll lose that trail in just a couple of years.

“And the seeds remain viable for decades: you might clear out a grove of alders and you’ll get this instant bloom of little broom sprouts from a previous exposure. This time of year, when the broom starts to blossom, we get a dramatic uptick in demand for the weed wrenches.”

Weed Wrenches come in four sizes: the Mini opens 1′ wide, weighs 5 lbs and is 24″, the Light is 11.5 lbs and 43″, the Medium is 17.5 lbs and 53″, the Jumbo opens 2.5″ wide, is 24 lbs and 60″ (five feet tall). I found both the Medium and Jumbo fairly heavy, comparable to a big brush-hog or a broadfork, but then I’ve got 50-year-old girly arms. Have a look on their website: www.weedwrench.com

If you drop by the Land Trust office on Bank Road, you might get lucky and find one in to test for heft, or you can call the Land Trust and put one on reserve; they’ll phone you when it’s been returned. This time of year, they want the tool back in a week.

Broom is blooming now and easily spotted. Smaller ones up to 3′ high can be yanked out by hand; larger ones need a weed-wrench, shovel, or hoedad. And for those brooms with trunks thicker than 2.5″ (too big for the Jumbo), Tom Dean says they can simply be sawn level to the ground: the oldest brooms, unlike their younger brethren, won’t resprout from their base when cut.

Brian Fisher/Peter Criss garden

Facebook Scoop: thanks to friending Sylvia Matlock of DIG, I caught her post about the garden tour she’s organizing for June 11th. Clicked to a slideshow on her website and saw immediately that I’d better go get tickets before the tour fills up.

She’s organized a tour of three gardens: an artists’ garden, a sculptor’s garden, and a kitchen potager with an outdoor pizza oven. “I wanted to do a tour that’s less overwhelming than VAA’s garden tour: something you could take in within a day.”

Brian Fisher and Peter Criss will open the garden that surrounds their studio: an island of gravel paths runs around “islands” of flower beds toward a white pergola draped with red roses.

Fisher / Criss garden

Penny Grist, a sculptor who lives on Quartermaster Harbor, has a small garden studded with her signature sculptures, gates, and tiled pathways. 

Grist Garden

John Jex and Sari Graven’s garden is a kitchen garden that includes an outdoor kitchen and a pizza oven. Sylvia said, “This oven was really simple to make: just buy the oven insert and build concrete blocks around it.” She said that John will demonstrate how to use this oven during the tour—some fresh-baked pizza al fresco, anyone?

An outdoor pizza oven anchors the Jex/Graven kitchen garden

Sylvia hopes to take about 30-50 folks on this tour; the $20/person admission covers refreshments. Phone 463-5096 or drop by the nursery at 19028 Vashon Highway to get tickets.

We picked up this box from a local grocery (won’t mention which), and later, Bob noticed where these “West Coast Tomatoes” actually came from. !!!

Which brings me to the subject of tomatoes. I’ve usually got my ‘Siletz’ bush tomatoes into the ground by mid-May, but this year I have only just moved them out of the house and into the cool greenhouse. Nights in the 40s are still in the forecast, and that’s cool enough to set tomatoes back a bit if they are unprotected. 

That hasn’t stopped some of us, reports Michelle of Pacific Potager. “The oldest gardeners on the island all seem to have planted their tomatoes already, and are picking up the odd ones that they like but don’t grow themselves. They’re looking for squash and cukes now.”

When I asked for tomato-protection ideas, she suggested, “Many people are using cinder blocks, which hold warmth and also have holes for hoops to make moveable impromptu greenhouses.  People line their tomato cages with plastic, tent their south-facing walls, line old bits of fence rolls with plastic, all kinds of things.”

Across from the Burton Post Office, I snapped this plastic lean-to protecting half-a-dozen tomatoes. Can’t say it felt much warmer in there—the sides were side open—but it’s got to cut down on moisture-sucking wind while still letting in the pollinators when the flowers appear. In years past, I’ve covered newly-planted tomatoes with reemay or clear plastic, both supported by hoops, and both times I was rewarded with ripe fruit in August.

Left: a Burton tomato lean-to; Right, Tony & Joe hardening off tomatoes

Amazing, Joe Curiel and Tony Raugust have had their tomatoes hardening outside since mid-April. He claims that younger plants don’t seem as affected by cold as more mature ones, and they “cozy them in” with a straw mulch, but no top cover. In the photo (taken two years ago), they were hardening off their plants on their south-facing porch, using this lattice to cut the wind a little and help prevent sun-scald on the leaves. They plant their tomatoes around April 29: “That way, we have a good shot at fruit by July 23rd or so.  Last year they went out May 8th—way too late—and August 8th was our first fruit.  But all of our varieties were disease free well into the fall and did surprisingly well last year even with the below average heat.” 

Choose varieties that claim to ripen in the 50-60 day range, such as Siletz, Stupice, Early Girl, or Taxi, or cherry tomatoes which don’t seem to need quite as much heat to ripen.

Another protective tip is to warm the soil with a layer of black plastic. It adds 3-5° more warmth to the soil—I measured with my compost thermometer to prove it to myself—plus it will retard weeds. Make sure your plastic makes contact with the soil by weighing it down with a few pebbles or ground staples.

With a little protection above and below, you can keep your just-planted tomatoes in the 50°-and-over temperature they require. And hopefully by August, you’ll have a crop like THIS— WhooHoo!

My 'Siletz', ready to eat on 8/14/2009. What a great tomato year...

Time to plant those empty rows at the Food Bank Farm on Wax Orchard Road

Two Saturdays ago at the Food Bank garden, Jenn Coe introduced me to four young AmeriCorps volunteers who were energetically turning over cover crop in the raised beds. I thought this spade-work must be part of their duties, but NOOO—they were digging for fun, in their spare time, doing back-breaking labor for extra credit.

This team of 3 girls and 1 guy arrived in March at Camp Sealth, who is hosting them for a 6-week stint of work there and around the Island. They’re specifically part of AmeriCorps’ National Civilian Community Corps, a descendent of the old Civilian Conservation Corps, plus a little military discipline thrown in. By committing to go serve four different non-profits in 10 months, a young person age 18-24 can earn a stipend of $200/week, plus an educational grant of $4725 to put toward college costs (or repayment).

So far, Stephen, Melissa, Jill, and Amy have been in Sacramento and the San Bernardino mountains, with their next stop Los Angeles. They’ve busted a lot of trail and are now all chain-saw certified, plus they’ve been trained in hazmat work and as first responders in disasters. They need to accumulate not only a total of 1700 hours of work for their host non-profit, they need to do 80 hours extra on their own. So they got in touch with Yvonne Pitrof, head of the Food Bank, and asked what they could do for the farm.

Jenn had high praise for them. “We were at the farm last week expanding the fence out, and you should have seen them, in the POURING RAIN, just soaked, but it didn’t phase them!” This comment got a laugh out of Stephen from California and Amy from Georgia: they shrugged it off and said, “Hey, we’re used to it: we’ve been busting trails a LOT down at Camp Sealth!” 

Next weekend will be their last on the Island, so next Saturday at the Farm (April 30), they’ll be leading a big Planting Party from 9am—noon. The first plantings went in last weekend, when Jenn, Jeff Lou, and myself plugged in 800 row feet of broccoli (Jeff did 800 feet’s worth of peas by himself!) There’s still many flats of chard, broccoli, and spinach waiting to go into the ground, so they sure could use your help next weekend. They’ll have coffee donated by the Roasterie, and perhaps some bakery treats as well.

So time to bring those seedling flats you’ve been growing on for the Food Bank, and bring your smile. And let’s all pray that you’ll need your sunscreen as well!  The farm’s at 24026 Wax Orchard Rd. — please park on the road.