Garden On, Vashon

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/