EVEN MORE UPDATED 6/23:  Q13 ran the short piece on the Vashon Island Food Bank farm last night: click here to see the 2-minute video: 

UPDATE: Jenn phoned me with the news that Q13 TV is coming TODAY—that Tuesday, June 22. They’ll probably arrive with cameras 2:30-3pm. So come with weeding tools and in your “most authentic” gardening togs.

If you haven’t had your 15 seconds of fame yet, here’s your chance. Jenn Coe, farmer for the Food Bank Garden, send this message around this morning—

“Hello fellow gardeners,

I will be at the Wax Orchard Farm tomorrow afternoon and so will Q13 T.V.!  
They would very much like to meet our volunteers, so come, weed and be famous!!!
I will be working 9am to 11:30 or so and then again 2pm to 5pm.  Q13 is expected in the afternoon.  Call if you need directions.

You can also join us at the Sunrise Ridge garden on Wednesday 9 to noon and then back at the farm on Thursday morning, 9am to noon.  If you would like to help, but these times don’t work for you, please call so we can arrange a better time.

Jenn
384-0973

The Beachcomber published their story on the Food Bank Farm last week. I know that the media often steals story ideas from each other… somebody at Q13 must be reading our local rag!

Cool! I got a photo of my garden on the Facebook pages of GrowVeg.

Earlier this spring, I blogged on using www.GrowVeg.com, the online vegetable bed planning software and have been using the software ever since to plan and keep records. They send e-articles monthly, and this month were writing about strawberries. One reader asked about a better way to protect strawberry beds against birds, so I commented about the way I net my raised beds.

Emails from me, from Jeremy Dore, the creator of GrowVeg, and Brenda the Curious Reader criss-crossed the web over the next 24 hours. Upshot is, Jeremy posted a photo I sent of my net-protected raised bed in my kitchen garden, plus the entire description of how this netting system works. It starts “Do you need to protect your garden crops from birds?” and continues on with the “Read More.”

To see the photo and what amounts to a small article (was I EVER brief?), visit GrowVeg’s “wall” by clicking here.

[I blogged this garden and gardener before, on December 7, 2009: for the full entry (which describes the garden's design and creation), click here to see "Garden Club Award Winners." ]

Listening to jazz on this drippy Saturday morning, Jazziness is what comes to mind as a metaphor for  John and Colleen James’ garden on the Burton loop. It’s a syncopation of hot colors and contrasts, of ‘Hot Lips’ and ‘Black-eyed Susans’, with daturas blowing trumpets and bugles swinging low, presided over by a ginger jar pot-bellied and blue.

Colleen has been gardening here since moving from Gig Harbor in 2005, and she started propagating plants in 2008. She used to create jewelry, but when the family strain of macular degeneration set in, she transferred her creative drive to an art with a broader brush. “Have you ever seen the late works of Monet?” she asked me. “He had macular degeneration, yet his last paintings are BEAUTIFUL!” 

So is her garden. Because of her vision’s need, her plant choices provide plenty of visual punch. She adores dark plants—especially purple—using them as a dark foil for golden foliage and yellow flowers.

You can see such contrasts quickly if you hang a right around the corner of the garage. There, shaded from 10am onward, is her shade garden. Here above a dark carpet of purple bugle, the golden Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra)and a golden lavatera light up the somber darks of Ligularia ‘yellow rocket’ and a black snakeroot at the corner—more teal than black here given the dearth of sun.

You might notice a little red-headed flower weaving in and out; this is Sage ‘Hot Lips’, which is all over this garden. As you exit the shade garden, head downhill to the house’s SE corner to see ‘Hot Lips’ full grown, a spectacle in red, white, and green. Next to it is another plant Colleen has much propagated, which she’s dubbed ‘Hot Pink’ after its neighbor. Colleen says ‘Hot Lips’ blooms from spring through frost, in full sun to partial shade, and literally REPELS deer.

This garden is open to deer, so Colleen’s garden design venture specializes in deer-resistant plants “though they can surprise you— this spring they’ve been eating my sedums!” (mine, too!) She’s found that deer don’t eat ligularias, hostas, japanese forest grass, royal fern or painted fern, or sweet box. I suspect one could add to that list her Japanese irises (Iris ensata), which she loves so much she propagated 350 of them last spring. 

 The garden slopes downward to the house, and there you’ll find the labor of Colleen’s winter: a greenhouse and benches with HUNDREDS of propagated plants she’ll offer for sale during tour. 20% of proceeds will go to VAA, the rest to help fund her “plant-aholic addiction.” She described the difficulty of getting Japanese iris to germinate—two striations, then mowing the tiny first leaves down to develop roots under grolites. “I just LOVE getting a seed to germinate.”

As you go back up the steps, try not to tromp on one of Colleen’s favorite fillers “that people don’t notice unless I point it out—the tiny daisy Erigeron, also known as fleabane or Santa Barbara daisy. It fills in so beautifully with little flecks of light, growing all over the place. It’s easy to yank out where I don’t want it, it’s not annoying, spills down through things, blooms all season.”

She also uses  ajuga—also known as purple bugle— as a ground cover. “It’s good growing against a succulent called golden “Angelina”  in the walkway—they’re pushy enough to fight each other.” And it’s so prolific that she’ll give people pieces of it, right out of the ground. So why not ask? And buy a few plants off her to support her “plant-aholic addiction” before the NW Perennial Alliance descends like a swarm later this summer. 

To get tickets to Vashon Allied Arts’ garden tour next weekend, June 26-27, go online to www.vashonalliedarts.org.

In so many ways, Sherene & Rick’s garden is an exercise in “Be Here, Now.”

When you come visit their garden on Indian Head, you’ll be handed a flyer that guides you down the “Meditation Path” they’ve created across their hillside. At its many stations, cued by quotation plaques and art, you can take in the distant view, the Wisdom of the Ages…

…and the inescapable feeling that while your thoughts may be high-flying, your feet are on precarious ground.

The Skillman/Zolno garden is on a high terrace of Indian Head, a forested slope of firs and maples, hemlocks and madrones, of leaf-muck clay and sandy pockets. Because it’s so steep, the soil wants to “Go Down There, Now” (it’s tried, at least three times) and so a garden has been developed to hold the land in place. 

Let’s take it from the top: the Salmon Gate, made by Rick Skillman, Valerie Willson & Penny Grist (artist credits for the many artworks will be on the flyer, so I won’t go on repeating them). The gate opens onto the head of a steep ravine where, in 1998, a large big-leaf maple fell, taking slopes, new paths, and brand-new stairway with it. To hold and restore this ground, Sherene replanted in natives like red-flowering currant, rhodies, nootka rose, and snowberry, which close to the paths is trimmed hedge-fashion.

As you wind down the stairs toward the greenhouse, you’ll come to a style of pipe-n-beam terracing that you’ll see throughout the garden. Three years after they moved here in 1995, their gardener Beth Kellner noticed sand eroding into the garage from the slope above. She recommended Al Bradley, rock and retaining wall specialist; he and crew drove rows of steel pipe 10-14 feet down into hardpan, then stacked 12′x4′ beams of PT behind the pipes (they’re masked by Rick’s wood-box “posts”).

When they noticed erosion around the south side of the house, Al started a new wall that ended up joining Rick’s goat-path to a plum tree he’d discovered east, buried under blackberries (the “Bodhi Tree”). That wall project laid down a path, which required a stairs, which needed a landing, on which Rick built a shelter, that now overhangs the pool that collects the waterfall that cascades down the stairs. One garden project suggested another.

Rick became very skilled at building wooden garden features, such as the Yogananda and St. Francis shelters. A devotee of Yogananda, he built the bench at the foot of the “Bodhi Tree”, their blackberry-rescued plum, and installed statues of Yogananda and the hermit saint Babaji. Beth and Sherene built a rock garden where the Yogananda statue sits today, and when Beth retired, Sherene took over all the gardening duties. She spends about 30% of her time now, gardening. (“70% prepping for tour,” she added.)

And they became art collectors. Down by the Dockton Overlook Deck, search for Rick’s “Sprite” garden of little figurines. 

The latest art, installed two weeks ago, is a railing of painted iron and blown-glass by Tacoma counselor/minister/iron-worker Chris Causey. The railing leads to the original lawn, which is ringed by perennials and two magnolias kept low against the view. Toward the back is an bellflower/astilbe/lily garden.

And there, you’ll find the latest bit of ground to succumb: it’s marked by a vertical field of foxgloves. This ground gave way in January 2009. Again, Al Bradley and Dave Stout battened down the ground, while Sherene and helper Norm replanted in natives, laying 25′ ladders upon the face of the slide for access to the slippery slope. 

Sherene, Rick, and their helpers have turned problems into opportunities. Take in their garden when you’re ready for inspiration and for the many rest-stops along their Meditation Path. And along the way, say a prayer for their garden: that it will “Be Here, Now” for the long run.

Tickets for the VAA Garden Tour, June 26-27, are available at the Blue Heron Art Center or online: www.vashonalliedarts.org.
Visitors should park above the garden on Pillsbury Road and enter the garden through the “Salmon Gate.” There’s limited “drop-off” parking at the bottom of a steep driveway.

Generous—that’s the best way to describe Kay White and her garden.

A lifetime of wonderful projects abound in her Maury Island garden: a pergola, lath house, and gazebo, a rill garden with fountain and fish pond, carpet beds of annuals and a woodland shrubbery. There’s even a tropical conservatory. 

But the real action is in the greenhouses. If you’ve ever bought one of the Garden Club’s tomato starts, 100 fuchsia baskets, or 250 potted-up geraniums, then you’ve taken home a little bit of Kay White’s generosity. She’s been growing these plants, gratis, for the garden club sale for nearly 20 years.

Sally Fox, neighbor and President of the Garden Club, says, “Kay has been a pillar in the Garden Club for thirty years and was president in the early 90s. She continues to give so much to the Club—and to our scholarship fund and school support—by propagating hundreds of plants for our annual plant sale. People come to the sale specifically asking for her geraniums, tomato starts, and fuschia baskets. There is a lot of appreciation in the Garden Club for all that Kay has given over these years, and she has a special place in our hearts.”

“In her quiet way, Kay inspires many of us—and she definitely inspires me. She loves her plants, loves her garden, and is still learning at age 89. There is nothing pretentious about her love of horticulture. She may not know all the botanical names of her plants, but she knows what pleases her and she stays actively engaged in her garden.”

Kay Walks Me Around

I was told to “come around back by the greenhouses: that’s where we’ll be.” I arrive to find Steve, her groundsman, scooping up gravel for a new driveway bed and joking with a co-worker. Suni, a slim Korean woman in gray turtleneck, finds Kay for me, then walks us into the white-fenced vegetable garden. Kay says to me quietly, “She does most of this,” as Suni explains how the broccoli got to be so large by early June (“I planted in February and put this reemay over it.”) and what that spear-headed perennnial is (“That’s red-vein sorrel—and that smaller one is regular lemon sorrel.”)

Their gravel-flecked soil has great tilth: it’s amended every October with okara, autumn leaves, and leftover grape skins from Andrew Will’s winery. “The okara smell goes away if we bury it quickly,” Kay says, “The blueberries love the wine lees!” Wood-shreddings left by road-crews hide black row-cloth covering the pathways —an anti-weed strategy I soon see that they use throughout the garden.” 

Suni heads back to the greenhouses as Kay and dog Silver walk me through the bedding-out garden. Here, dakota-stone raised beds are filled with lithodora, zonal geraniums, pansies or petunias, One bed’s filled with Asiatic lilies just starting to bloom. As we head further past the Lath House, the manmade stone gives over to walls of cobbles. “It pops out of our soil—the quarry’s just down the hill, you know,” Kay explains. 

I enter the Conservatory and gasp—there’s a grass hut in here! As well as a fountain and pool, cobblestone raised beds filled with birds-of-paradise and blue nile flowers (agapanthus), a Sago Palm (cycas revoluta)  that Kay brought from Pasadena when they moved here in 1978, and in the back, the Cactus Corner. “Myrna’s doing this: she likes cactus.” 

In the very back, Kay shows me their drying shed for tulip bulbs, pulled from the raised beds a few weeks ago; they’re sorted by height, “but we can’t keep the colors straight so we don’t even try.” In another few weeks, the died-down foliage will be pulled and the bulbs brushed clean, then sacked for re-planting next fall.

We walk on past the soft-fruit corral, a large, netted enclosure filled with beds of strawberries, blueberries, gooseberries and currants. We pass around a fat cedar and oh MY, there’s the iris bed—a FIELD full of frilly bearded irises with—as I trip over one—a label for each specimen. “Did you go wild with the Cooley’s catalog?” I ask. “No—the Schreiner’s,” she replies, smiling. “It’s a hobby of Myrna’s and mine. We cannot resist that catalog.” 

On to the wetland with its little bridge and the horsetail hedge … up the shrubbery slope to the white-clad gazebo looking (once upon a time) to Mt. Rainier … past the kalmias in bright-red bloom, on through the orchard to take a rest in the “Rill Garden” that hides near the house, where we sit talking and watch a pair of goldfinches drink from the fountain at the rill’s head.

Finally, she walks me up and down the former golf course. “My husband Bill was a golfing enthusiast, and he created five regulation-length fairways with putting greens, holes, and sand-traps.” Its greenswards are bordered by trees they bought from Briggs Nursery in Olympia 30 years ago: deodar cedars and lawson’s golden cypress, crabapples and ginkgos along the driveway, a dawn redwood and an empress tree (pawlownia) that should be in purple bloom come tour. She was particularly proud of what she called a “pinus tortuosa,” a conifer with needles curled as if raking its inner blackboard.

As we come full circle, the white pergola comes back into view. It’s so magnificent, you barely notice the Sunglo greenhouses behind it. “This was my original greenhouse,” Kay invites me inside, “but my husband had to have one three times larger.” That’s the one next door, still holding benches of zonal geraniums left over from the Garden Sale. I notice orderly rows of plastic pots, clean and arranged from tiny to large; “Suni’s daughter does that for us.”

Finally, around back toward Mt. Rainier, she shows me the shed where the petunias have been hardening off. “These are all open-pollinated, and I think our seeds make plants that are VERY vigorous. Anything we take seeds from are healthier than the seeds from the store.” And in so many different colors, even striped: she’s got a right to be proud.

Suni, Steve, and the other co-workers have disappeared, as is the afternoon light. I say goodbye, and she replies, “Come back any time!”

And I plan, during tour, to come late if the day’s sunny: you’ll find Kay’s garden offers a relaxing stroll without the press of your fellow touristos, and the afternoon light pouring down the top of Raecoma hill should make her garden eloquently beautiful.

For tickets to the Vashon Allied Arts Garden Tour on June 26-27, visit www.vashonalliedarts.org/

Joanne says it best in this week’s e-notice from Plum Forest Farm, “EAT A LOT OF SALAD!” 

“Just a reminder that this is THE season of salad, so remember to luxuriate in it.  We have been eating salad as a meal, often twice a day.  We each fill a large plate with our salad mix [available at their farmstand on Tuesday afternoons, eggs daily by 10am] and add sliced radish and/or apple, dried cherries, cashews or almonds, some grated gruyere cheese, smoked salmon, and/or avocado if we have it, and our favorite salad dressing.  Our young daughters prefer the creamy salad dressing varieties, but Rob and I like the vinaigrettes.”

I’m with you, Joanne. Let’s all eat salad, and learn to make a good vinaigrette. 

My salad greens, big enough to rub elbows in my kitchen garden, are delicate both in taste and texture. In fact, without a daily rain or watering, the leaves lose their “starch” and become more the texture of tissue paper  (I suspect my very sandy soil lets the water drain off before the lettuce can absorb it.) Even with a night’s rain, the leaves are juiciest if I harvest them by mid-morning and let them soak til’ lunch in a bowl of tepid water, then finish in a quick cold water bath before spinning.

Vinaigrette Variations Around the Globe

You don’t want to smother such young, tender leaves in a thick sauce: you want to just coat them to let their forms and delicacies express themselves. Here’s several vinaigrettes that anybody can whip up last-minute.

A french-style vinaigrette uses 3 tablespoons olive oil to 1 of wine vinegar or lemon juice with a dab of dijon mustard. The italian style uses 4 tablespoons of oil to vinegar, and I like combine rice and balsamic vinegars in my tablespoon’s worth to give both snap and depth to the sauce. Salt, pepper, season, mix, and toss with the greens. 

Another favorite is a german style of 2 parts vinegar to 1 part vegetable oil, plus enough sugar to take the sting out of the vinegar and a grinding of fennel seed, anise seed, caraway, or dill weed. Go asian with the same proportions of oil and RICE vinegar (perhaps combo’ed with lime juice), plus a teaspoon’s splash of fish sauce and plenty of sugar. 

Variety Adds Spice to a Green Salad

A mixture of greens looks great in the garden and tastes just as wonderful in the salad bowl. Above, you can see my baby bok choy, mustard ‘Red Giant’, and  looseleaf lettuce ‘Black-seeded Simpson” behind, in a bed just outside my kitchen door.

Having the beds close makes easy harvesting at the last minute: I grab my spinner’s inner colander, fill it with 2/3 mixed lettuce leaves, then top with leaves of choi, mustard, broccoli rabe, chard, cress, kale, beets, cilantro, or spinach. If my beds need thinning, I pluck the largest of the baby veg, twist off the tap-root, and toss the whole baby into the lettuce’s bathwater. 

I’ve never grown mustards before: they provide a bitey green tang that juices up my salivary glands. But I get real punch in my bowl from cress. This isn’t the stuff that needs a running stream: my seeds, from Johnny’s, are called ‘Wrinkly Crinkly’ and the little plants aren’t any more demanding of water than your lettuces. I pluck thumb-sized leaves individually; the plant wants to bolt at 6″ high if it escapes the notice of my greedy pincers. I just read that you can grow this stuff on wet paper towels, in the same conditions as needed by your bean sprouting jar, and it’ll be ready within a week.

With the garden still rained on and my lettuces all harvestable now, I’m thinking of replacements. Might be a good idea to plug harvest-holes with replacement transplants or seeds. Might still have time to start a new flat of seedlings, since I KNOW lettuce doesn’t like to germinate in summer’s heat. Heck, the winter garden needs starting in July, and that’s a mere month away.

By then, all this lettuce will want to bolt. Last year I did come up with a week’s worth of fix for bitter lettuce by adding salt to its bath water to draw out the bitter juices. This year, I’m contemplating other, weirder techniques to delay the bolting. If lettuce is sensitive to over-long days, perhaps I should put them to sleep earlier in the day, like one does a parrot, by throwing a cover over their heads? If they’re heat-sensitive, perhaps popsicles of ice water thrust deep into their bed will cool their bolting heels?

Love the Rain, as long as it will stay. And long live our salad days.

It’s still raining, but more lightly, when I take the right-hand fork toward to Jonathan Morse’s cottage. In this wide Cedarhurst ravine, my eyes meet dark shadows, greens of apple and lime, silvery light. Yes, those are the colors of this moist May rainday—but also the colors caught in a strange obstacle I can see through: a gateway wall studded with fifteen windows, stood up with steel, painted in multi-green stripes of wood siding, its top implanted with—is that hair sedge?
      ”Yes, that’s Carex Comans ‘Frosted Curls,” Jonathan tells me. He’s a tall brunette in his 30s, cheeks red from being outdoors in cool weather, hands deep in pockets of a gortex jacket. “I thought about this project for over a year. My granddad—he was a civil engineer—had these steel i-beams laying around, and I wanted to do something with them, to put a barrier here to keep the eye from traveling straight down to the water. Then, when I visited my sister in Chicago, she took me to Frank Lloyd Wright’s house in Oak Park. I was inspired by this stained glass window there called “Forest Canopy” that picked up the way colors play in the forest. So that helped me figure out where to go with this project.”

 There’s certainly a forest canopy frame to this property: the usual firs, cedars, and alders seem even taller than usual.There’s a seasonal creek that runs invisibly along one driveway, completely covered by salmonberry and ferns. 

Against this tall green dominance, Jonathan has spent twelve years building a garden of Color and Contrast, framed by strongly-shaped beds. Foliage seems more important to the design than flowers. There’s a small example in the entrance space, where a tall Oregon grape, Mahonia x media ‘Charity’, towers over a purple persicaria and golden wood millet. Shapes and foliage colors contrast with each other and with the surfaces—gravel, mulch, lawn—that underlay them.

As we walk down to the shoreline, we walk past a line-up of shrubs. Purple smoke-bush rubs shoulders with a fluffy golden Cryptomeria japonica ‘Sekkan-Sugi’ next to a dark ninebark, followed by a “butterfly” magnolia and, finally, a blue-gray alpine eucalyptus. Here, plants stand in contrast to each other in form and color: this is a “Look at THIS!” garden. 

His azara is variegated. His hop-vine is ‘golden.’ His little holly isn’t just prickly: it’s a ” silver hedgehog” holly (Ilex Aquifolium ‘Ferox Argentea’). Uncommon plants are abundant here, planted in uncommon associations: a spiderwort ‘blue and gold’ in a wine barrel with an alpine fir, a shade-loving brunnera ‘Jack Frost’ growing with some sun-loving heathers and an olearia bush in a shoreline bed. 

Jonathan has been working on this landscape for the last twelve years. He really seems to know his plants: turns out he’s a fellow Fairhaven grad with a self-designed degree in “Organic Plant Cultivation.” He’s worked at Island Lumber’s gardening center for the last three years, but he’s gardened since he was a kid. I ask his dad, Bill, if he’s got a role in all this: “I’m only the grunt labor,” he says with a smile.

We wind around his parents’ house (the narrow west alley was his first garden project here) and come to the Alpine Garden. “This used to be a parking lot, but what a waste,” Jonathan says, “it’s the best place on the property for sitting because it’s higher and gets more sun.”  The area’s sandy soil is topped with an inch or two of decomposed granite that mulches alpines, hens-n-chicks and other sedums planted around lowbush blueberries, alpine firs, and weeping Alaskan cedars.  Another wonderful design of his, the Cedar Entry (top photo), is made from logs left from a take-down project of the power company. Note its sedum-filled roof.

Between the Cedar Post Gate and the greenhouse, a path winds downhill upon heavy rock walls. These Jonathan built in 2001 and 2004 to protect this hillside against runoff pouring down the ravine. The terraces originally held vegetables, but now only dahlias and onions remain. His mother Betty presents me with a bag of “walking onion” sets. In the greenhouse, Jonathan is growing his garden’s next generation: I see plenty of tiny hellebores. “When I’m tired of something or it’s exhausted, I like to have new plants on hand to plug in.” 

We move to the “new” vegetable garden and yet another amazing project, just completed: an entrance wall made with wood rounds and “windows” of rusted conduit pipe, all of it mortared together with mud. The dark green, wooden door is grid-punched with 3″ holes, all 240 of them coated lime-green for—of course—color contrast. “I was worried the door was going to be too heavy, so the holes became a way to lighten it up.” 

The vegetable garden started just as individual orchard-tree fences, joined up as a corridor as the trees grew, then Jonathan realized “with just a little more fencing”, he could enclose an entire meadow. So food production moved inside the fence, as did many perennials that deer love. 

 The vegetable garden is circular and divided like a pie (another plant pun?) And in the shady area south, look for the bed completely devoted to purple-leafed ligularia, hopefully sparkling with yellow flowers, the apricot heucheras ‘Tiramisu’, and the darkly splotched podophyllum (May Apple) against the shed.

Folks, take this garden in early, while your eyeballs are still refreshed. It’s more than a feast for the eyes: as we used to say in high school, it’s a “pig-out.”

I’ll be previewing the other gardens of the VAA Garden Tour in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

For tickets to the VAA Garden Tour on June 26-27, visit here: http://vashonalliedarts.org/specialevents/gardentour/gardentour.htm

Tickets for this year’s VAA Garden Tour are on sale now. Regularly $25/person, they’re available for $20/person through the end of May. Garden Tour is Saturday-Sunday, June 26 & 27. For more information, visit www.vashonalliedarts.org.

I was invited to tour a wonderful old garden last week and then sworn to secrecy about its whereabouts or its owner’s name. I can understand, living where they do. Let’s just say that the property is uphill from a large beach, the kind of place where humans have always loved to congregate. Our gardener—let’s call her “G”— not only had her own garden stories to tell, but speculations about her place going back, back, WAY back.

When I arrived, I found G weeding in the flowerbeds fronting a little white bungelow. “Shhhhhh—my daughter’s sleeping in there,” she warns me, then explains that her  own mother moved into this garage/studio at the end of her life. 

Here in the backyard, G has a small vegetable patch that’s fenced and some fruit trees. A young peach tree is loaded with dime-sized fruit. A gnarly ol’ apple tree—she describes it as “an old-fashioned Red Delicious, before they bred it up”—spreads its limbs over the driveway. Twenty years ago its core grew hollow and started to rot, so they filled it with four bags of concrete. “It keeps fruiting and did pretty well last year.”

“There were fruit trees here when we arrived [in 1977], but most have died off. We’ve replaced them.” The ranch-style house is a renovation—”There was another house here before: I think it was a lodge.” A small cabin still stands on the other side of the fence—all that’s left of a once-popular retreat?

As we walk down the driveway, G points out the native rhododendrons grown tall, their purple trusses just filling out. A few steps south, a pink hybrid rhody out-blooms the natives and elbows aside what appears to be a 10-foot kalmia. Another gigantic rhododendron with rose-red flowers looms over this south lawn. “You can see siblings of this rhody all around—see, there’s one across the street. I think somebody brought a truckload of plants here and sold them door-to-door.”

Every shrub is huge, but the presence looming over all is of scent, not sight: a 20-foot deciduous azalea, its golden blossoms at their peak or past it, its sugar-sweet perfume flooding the air. These shrubs were obviously planted long before G arrived.

The place was calved off, long ago, from a summertime estate held by a wealthy Seattle family. This neighborhood dates back to the late 1800s, and certainly these rhodies are as large as those in Portland’s Rhody Test Garden, established in the early 1900s (reviewed last week). Were these tree-sized shrubs planted by a gardener of that family? 


As we go around the corner of the house, she points out a snowball bush. “My husband planted this because his mother had one: he and his siblings used to use the flowers for snowball fights.” G plucked one of the pure white globes and tossed it to me. “Go ahead—throw one at the dog.” And I think “Now THIS is what new parents should plant instead of a commemorative tree— the kids will have so much more fun with their snowballs!”

A few steps away, G stops. “Right here were two huge Sugar Pines—well, they might have been Ponderosa Pines. But they were HUGE—four people together couldn’t reach around them—and the cones and needles were over a foot long.”

“Remember that storm in 1979 that took out the Hood Canal Bridge?” she continues. “I was over in Seattle with my daughter and new grand-baby. We missed the ferry, got on the next—the last one, it turns out—and the dockhands made us gun our engines and get ready to jump onto the loading ramp because it was BOUNCING off the ferry deck.”

“When we got home, we found our neighbors in our drive with tarps and chain-saws, because the tops of the pines had fallen on our roof. One branch punched through the kitchen and, I’m not kidding, turned and went down the hallway. If we’d caught that first ferry, we would have been in the kitchen unloading groceries, and who KNOWS…!” She pauses, takes a breath. “And now, where the trees fell through the roof, I’ve got skylights!” 

As we come full-circle, she points to the ground by a circling hedge and says, “”We used to find bottles back here dated late 1800s—dozens of bottles, it was like a dump. One day my son came inside and said to my husband, ‘Dad, the Blazer’s sinking into a hole!’ One front tire was sunk right to the car frame. We got the Blazer out and found a 6′ wide by 20′ deep hole with clean sides. We think it was an old well. Years before, it had been covered with boards and a few inches of dirt. You know, we had children—they could have fallen in!—so my husband spent the summer poking every inch of our ground, looking for more holes.”

We’re back at my car, but G slips inside the hedge and I follow. “This is my secret garden: I come here because it’s always quiet and green and cool. I mostly planted natives in here, and in the summer we hang Indonesian chimes from these trees.”

She puts a hand on the long-reaching arm of a conifer I don’t recognize—one of two. “Do you recognize what these are? It’s a Pacific Yew—you know, the kind they harvest for Taxol? They’re native to the Olympic Peninsula, and it’s extremely rare for one to show up on this side of the Olympics. I had a tree expert here once, and he thought these were about 200 years old. Apparently Indians used the bark on wounds, so I like to think that a Shaman lived in my secret garden and planted these trees here.”

More rain is threatening, so I get in my car next to the former Hole-that-Ate-the-Blazer, under the shade of the Apple-Tree-Filled-With-Concrete. I think of the treasures found in my own former digs: the pickaxe head my husband’s mower ran into, the top of a painter’s kit found in a flowerbed. We can’t always know for sure what the facts are behind our garden discoveries, but it’s pleasant to speculate, isn’t it? And even better to have a good Show-n-Tell for a pair of ears wide open.

(Thanks to G for the opening photo of the rhody-drive and of the close-up of the rose-colored rhody truss. The other images are mine.)

Coming up: Talking with the Gardeners on this year’s VAA Garden Tour

 I just spent six days in The City of Roses, my hometown. Much of my visit was focused on a recuperating Mom, but hubbie and I did manage to get away to Crystal Springs Rhododendron Test Garden, one of my favorite Portland destinations for the month of May.

Located next to Reed College in southeast Portland, this Portland Park is named for the many natural springs that rise from a huge aquifer underground here—once considered for the source of Portland’s drinking water.

Two lagoons and a lake surround a rhody-planted island and peninsula, which you reach via two bridges and many wandering paths. The oldest rhododendrons here date from the 1930s, but you can also see azaleas, hostas, magnolias, ferns, wonderful drifts of candlelabra primroses, hardy geraniums, and a winter garden on the peninsula. 

So here’s a bit of eye-candy for your enjoyment. If you can get away to Portland soon, Crystal Springs can be found on the southwest corner of Reed College, on SE Woodstock off 39th.

Back in “Summerplace”, the development where my mother lives, the irises, pansies, azaleas and even the roses were coming on strong. Cruising other people’s flowers—the one thing I miss about living in a neighborhood.


But when I returned, my own iris bed was in bloom—irises given to me by friends in exchange for dividing their own. Thanks, Bea, Sharon, and Linda! So good to be back in my Island home!