Garden On, Vashon

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