Even before I climbed the stairs to the Seattle garden of Bonnie Berk and Larry Kessler during our mid-July ‘GardenFling’ tour of gardens in Washington State, I stood admiring the lush streetscape. An exquisitely planted boulevard (you really can’t denigrate this by calling it a ‘hellstrip’) and burgundy-leaved trees and shrubs were arrayed in front of a monolithic stucco wall. That brick-topped wall and double staircase were part of the vision of Seattle’s well-known architect Arthur Lamont-Loveless (1873-1971) who, at the time he designed the house in 1916, was also president of the Washington Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
But Bonnie Berk, below, had her own vision for the house and garden, especially the slope leading to the street. When she purchased the property in 1995, she was busy with a successful consulting business she’d launched in 1988 working on public-private partnerships and “the spectrum of major public policy issues, developing long range strategies and facilitating agreements among diverse communities.” (BERK Consulting) After retiring from the company in 2013 and marrying Larry Kessler, the Chairman of Health Services at the University of Washington School of Public Health the following year, she had time to devote herself to the garden. Today, she’s heavily involved in local gardening initiatives, including the board of the Northwest Horticultural Society, the Hardy Fern Foundation and Far Reaches Botanical Conservancy.
Anyone who has gardened on a steep slope knows the challenges of designing, planting and maintaining such a space. In 2000, when Berk began the job of repairing the stairs, cracked walls and central terrace, she also tackled the slope to the wall, creating terraces for planting. Today, the slope is a colourful tapestry of perennials, bulbs and shrubs. Containers sit on the brick-topped retaining wall and at the top of the north slope is a weathered metal sculpture titled ‘Joy’ by Jennifer Gilbert Asher & Mario Lopez; it echoes the warm colour of the bricks and the bronze foliage of the dwarf Japanese maples.
It’s clear even before climbing to the house level that Bonnie Berk is in love with plants of all kinds and designs with an artist’s sensitivity to form, texture and colour.
”Indian Summer’ alstroemeria — which I also photographed at Dan Hinkley’s Windcliff’ — has a starring role here.
Dark-leaved dahlias, a fountain of variegated moor grass (Molinia caerulea ‘Variegata’), pink sanguisorba bottlebrush flowers and blue agapanthus adorn the slope’s south side. Near the top is a metal sculpture by Jim Honold titled ‘Moongate’ and beyond, a brilliant chartreuse bouquet of ‘Golden Spirit’ smokebush (Cotinus coggygria).
Boxwood hedging defines a planting terrace while the sculpture frames daisies and lilies at the top of the slope. Beyond is a 20-foot high high cherry laurel hedge (Prunus laurocerasus) believed to have been planted when the house was built. It affords privacy from the neighbours while creating a dramatic backdrop to the plantings on the house level. (When I was a little girl in Victoria, B.C., the shiny, oblong leaves of cherry laurel were the “dollar bills” we stacked at the cash register in our make-believe store.)
A peach-coloured hyssop (Agastache) is in full bloom — always a favourite with hummingbirds — and behind is a stand of summer alliums, likely ‘Millenium’.
On the main staircase terrace is an antique Singer sewing machine pedestal topped by a metal table filled with succulents. And all around are colourful containers filled with treasures.
A closer look at the succulents in their gravelly soil.
Turning left at the top of the stairs, we come to a long mixed border fronting the laurel hedge and centered with a patio featuring a black Luytens bench under a Jim Honold-designed metal arch wreathed in variegated Kadsura japonica ‘Chirimen’. Kadsura is an evergreen, Japanese, woodland vine related to Schisandra and features glossy leaves on stems that can reach 15 feet. It bears tiny, yellow, magnolia-like flowers and edible fruit. This patio with its many containers seemed like a beautiful stage set with the laurel hedge a leafy back curtain.
The brickwork in the paving and the arch carry the colour theme. The handsome Rex begonia at right typifies Berk’s love of good foliage.
Foliage surrounds a sculpture titled ‘Mother Nature’.
Further along the border, a sculpture nestles behind a hydrangea, with the russet seedheads of rodgersia echoing the rusty metal.
Here, a shower of tiny, lilac thalictrum flowers and starry clematis rise above the leaves of Deutzia scabra ‘Variegata’.
Some gardens can be seen in a glance, but Bonnie Berk’s plantings are like tiny paintings, each one different from the next. There’s no “three of this-and-five of that” ethos here. It’s all jewels.
‘Antonow’s Blue’ honeybush (Melianthus major) is a semi-evergreen shrub that bears red-bracted flowers in late summer – but it’s primarily grown for its stunning, glaucous foliage.
The house’s siding is finished in a dramatic black that acts as an effective background for many of Berk’s dark pots. But a red Adirondack chair on this side deck looks like a comfy spot for enjoying the view.
Sculptures and pots are arrayed on steps to another terrace off the house’s living room, which affords a view to the east of Lake Washington.
A white clematis flower emerges from a glazed pot
The path beneath the house’s front terrace is edged by a rich diversity of shade-loving foliage plants.
In a sunnier spot, the silvery-blue stems of skyscraper senecio (Curio ficoides ‘Mount Everest’) illustrate the plant collector’s passion.
Native to Japan and Korea, the shredded umbrella plant (Syneilesis aconitifolia) bore a solitary flower stem, its attractive foliage more chartreuse in this garden than I’d seen before.
As it was time to leave this jewelbox Seattle garden, I spotted a plant I had heard about but never seen, Paris polyphylla, a trillium cousin native to China. And I thought how appropriate, in this garden of rareties, to be treated to yet another. If only I’d had another four or five hours to spend here! Thank you, Bonnie Berk.
Circling back to one of the fabulous gardens I saw this summer while on a Tacoma-area “Garden Fling” with fellow bloggers and Instagrammers, let’s head across on the ferry from Tacoma to Vashon Island. Before arriving at the garden, as you can see Vashon is just as picturesque a seaside setting as you’d imagine, albeit with some of the invasive plants I recognize from my own country neighbourhood, far away in central Ontario. Yes, pink everlasting sweet pea (Lathyrus latifolius) and yellow tansy (Tanacetum vulgare) can be found near my cottage on Lake Muskoka – but those arching boughs of Himalayan blackberry (Rubus armeniacus) are sweet memories of my Victoria, B.C. childhood – even though I know they’re one of the very worst invasives in the Pacific Northwest. But let’s drive on to Maury Island, which is a “tied island” linked to Vashon via a man-made isthmus to visit my featured garden.
It’s a testament to the hard work and creativity of Whit and Mary Carhart that the photo below of textural shade plants flanking a generous path near the top of their garden is here at all. Why? Because this is one of the few almost-level areas sculpted from a steep forest hillside that would have tried the imagination and engineering capabilities of lesser gardeners.
A bed of treasured alpines retained with wooden ties traces the angles of the slope.
Moving up and down the hillside is challenging enough for a gaggle of garden bloggers. But actually working this garden would put stairmaster exercises to shame! (And these are just a few of the level changes.)
Let’s move down towards sea level and admire the Carharts’ skill with container plants – especially those that feature good foliage contrasts. Who needs flowers?
Understandably, most of the plantings are shade lovers like the rodgersia left of the colorful sculpture by Vashon mosaic artist Clare Dohna.
Arriving at the base of the hillside — and despite the difficult light conditions – I admired the cedar shake cladding and sprawling architecture of the Carharts’ home. Astilbes were in full summer bloom along the path.
A rich, teal-blue trim accents the cedar cladding.
On the porch is another whimsical Clare Dohna mosaic sculpture.
Adirondack chairs at the back of the house look out onto the bay view reflected in the window. I love the combination of small river rock and stone pavers.
This corten planter shows how a simple combination of colourful foliage plants – shrub, tropical, perennials – is handsome and effective. And the planter colour ties in with the siding.
The glossy brown pot at right also matches the house siding and features a soft colour palette and varying textures of plants including silvery Senecio candicans ‘Angel Wings’ and variegated ‘Tasmanian Tiger’ euphorbia (E. characias) with small-leaved Veronicapimeleoides ‘Quiksilver’, a hebe, at right.
I can imagine the sound of the grasses swishing in the wind as the family enjoys a meal on this patio.
My impression of the Carhart garden will always be “comfortable chairs everywhere”….
….. including a shady glade overlooking Quartermaster Bay where a series of colourful chairs are arranged in a conversational grouping.
The sunniest aspect around the house features a profusion of perennials and tall lilies.
What clever positioning of these fish swimming upstream on a waterfall of Hakonechlora macra ‘Aureola’…. to spawn, perhaps?
I’ve felt the same way at times. Glad to see someone thought to put it on a sign at this sweet playhouse, built by Vashon Islander Gary Sipple.
A good motto for this garden.
As a lover of colour, I appreciate well-considered vignettes like this, with the ‘Lucifer’ crocosmia echoing the persimmon of the bistro table and chairs.
What a great garden for a party – seating everywhere.
Chartreuse and lime are favourites of mine – I’d love this bench in my garden.
I ask Whit Carhart to pose for me. A retired doctor, he and his wife Mary have poured a lot of creativity, energy and love into this garden since 2000 when they started working on it. Though their property includes a large tract of natural Stewardship Forest, the cultivated area totals 2.5 acres. When Whit was developing his interest in gardening, he took a course at Edmond’s Community College from then-Horticulture Professor Dan Hinkley, whose wonderful garden Windcliff I wrote about recently.
Partway up the slope is the most naturalistic swimming pool I’ve ever seen. Designed in 2008 to evoke Japanese garden style by landscape designer Terry Welch, it is saltwater and fed by a waterfall. Surrounded by smooth rocks and low plantings, it even features a small island with an evergreen.
There are artful fish ‘spawning’ here as well!
As I head further up the slope, I pause at a lovely Japanese-inspired gazebo
Set into a cement pad in the floor at the front is a notation; water has settled around it, charmingly reflecting the foliage of the trees above.
Looking back down at the gazebo from the path above.
Moving up, I pass a container planted with handsome Fatsia japonica ‘Spiderweb’.
Further up, I spotted the brilliant blue of Salvia patens.
I wish I’d had time to move slowly through the plantings, which were exquisite. Two of my fellow bloggers captured much more in this garden than I did and I’m taking the opportunity to introduce them to you here. Pam Penick from Austin, Texas is one of the founders of this annual tour. Formerly called the Garden Bloggers Fling, it’s been shortened to The Garden Fling and includes Instagrammers, Tik-Tokkers and industry folk. Here is her blog on the Carhart Garden.
The organizers of our Puget Sound Garden Fling this July chose the perfect garden in which to let us gather as a group, feet tired from a day of touring, glasses of wine in hand, to marvel at a textural, art-filled garden sculpted from a steep hillside and appointed with sleek, beautiful outdoor furnishings. As a lover of colour, I was wowed by the garden of Mac Gray and Meagan Foley overlooking Tacoma’s Commencement Bay — and I loved everything about this dramatic, chartreuse-black combination on the terrace.
It made for a very convivial setting!
Though black as an attractive finish for fences and decorative features is now being seen more often, this garden used it in diverse ways, like this sleek wall fountain adding its own splashing soundtrack to our party.
Black continues to be a unifying theme in the pool at the base of the hillside garden where a herd of hippos meander along the shore and a sculptural black fountain creates its own music beneath a massive gunnera, its strong stems echoed in orange spikes.
The plant colour palette is mostly restricted to greens with chartreuse Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra ‘All Gold’) creating luminous leafy fountains here and there. Pieces of art are nestled into the rocks that form the hillside landscape while also retaining the steep slope. At the top of the hill near a copse of white-trunked birches is a massive Stonehenge-like sculpture.
Black planters add to the garden’s dark touches.
‘All Gold’ Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra) is one of the best grasses for all-season chartreuse colour. It prefers damp soil and is perfect for a pondside planting.
Flowers come and go, say seasoned garden designers, but foliage is king. Here we see a compact Japanese maple adding a note of wine to the many greens.
Hostas and sedges (Carex spp.) enjoy the moist conditions in the lower slope.
Higher up, a chartreuse pot lifts colourful shade-lovers above the green foliage plants.
Everywhere are touches of chartreuse and black, like these glazed garden balls tucked below ferns.
The motif seems to be plants + art, including these interesting scrolls in the tile below the shield ferns (Polystichum spp.).
Standing on the terrace sipping my wine, I was transfixed by a semi-circular black sculpture glimpsed through the pendulous boughs of a weeping willow. When I asked Meagan Foley about it, she said she had looked at that part of the hillside and felt it needed a strong piece of art – and this was the beautiful result.
Focusing in on the sculpture, I saw that it was cut out to perfectly frame the yellow spikes of ligularia up the slope.
Not all the artistic touches are one-of-a-kind sculpture, however. There is space in the garden for pure fun, too.
Heading to the front of the house and a balcony overlooking the front garden and Puget Sound, I found more nods to black and chartreuse in the ceramic bamboo culms and furnishings. I imagine this is a wonderful spot for a morning coffee, gazing at the hummingbirds under the Japanese maple and watching the trains pass by on the shore of Commencement Bay. Thank you Meagan and Mac, for sharing it with us.
**********
Do you love charteuse plants too? Here’s a blog I did with lots of ideas for splashing a little of that sunshine-green hue in your garden: Cordial Charteuse on the Garden Menu
And here are my previous blogs on Puget Sound Gardens:
The Wonders of Windcliff – the Indianola garden of famed plant explorer Dan Hinkley and architect Robert Jones
A Return to Heronswood – nineteen years later, I returned to this resurrected oasis on Kitsap
Two of the major reasons I wanted to participate in this year’s Garden Fling in Washington State’s Puget Sound region – to leave behind the July meadows at my cottage on Ontario’s Lake Muskoka when the wild beebalm is coming into bloom – were, quite simply, Heronswood and Windcliff. All of the gardens we visited held their share of magic and heaps of horticultural expertise, but the chance to visit these two related Kitsap Peninsula garden meccas made the decision for me.
In 2000, when Dan and Robert were still at Heronswood, they found this property on a small lane in the village of Indianola, as Dan said in a speech at the New York Botanical Garden some years ago. It was 6-1/2 acres on a 200-foot bluff above Puget Sound and “the complete opposite of what I was gardening with at Heronswood.” Windcliff had been given its name by its then-owners, Peg and Mary, who had been raising German shepherds here while regularly mowing acres of summer-browned lawn. As Dan says, this part of the Pacific Northwest averages just 28 inches of rain per year with little measurable rain between spring and fall. So for him, a lawn was out of the question. “I’m not a friend of this whole concept of throwing water and fertilizer on something to make it grow, so we can then cut it on a weekly basis. What an amazing waste of energy.”
I wrote about Heronswood in my last blog – now let’s head down the long driveway toward the house at Windcliff.
There are 4 acres of treasures on this side of the house under the big forest trees, including an arboretum of rare trees and shrubs with a rich ground layer of unusual plants, many also sold in the on-site nursery. Be sure to check out the colourful bamboos, including Fargesia robusta ‘Campbell’, an eye-catching clumping species with its white sheaths.
There are bamboo tunnels, too.
At Heronswood, I saw a single plant of Alstroemeria isabellana; here it grows in a generous drift.
Nearby is Alstroemeria ‘Indian Summer’, a hardy, clumping form of Peruvian lily with purplish foliage that tops out at 3-feet (1 m) in height.
Flame nasturtium (Tropaeolum speciosum) clambers through shrubs and trees, already forming its beautiful, dangling fruit.
I snap photos as I walk and recognize this small, elegant tree as a podocarp. But its identity is confirmed when I find John Grimshaw’s erudite page on Podocarpus salignus, including his photo of this very tree at Windcliff.
Japanese clethra (C. barbinervis) is showing off its scented, spiky, white flowers above a trunk with handsome, exfoliating bark.
At the bottom of the driveway we arrive at the house: a low-slung, Asian-inspired building in three connected pavilions designed and built by Robert and clad in aubergine-purple shakes. (Even the chimney stones are colour-coordinated!) Stretching across the front is an architectural assemblage of fibre-clay pots. Wreathed around the front door is a perfumed, narrow-leafed sausage vine (Holboellia angustifolia) grown from seed Dan collected on one of his twenty exploring trips to the north part of Vietnam. That particular collection took the form of Dan’s guide eating the sweet fruit, then spitting the dark seeds into a zip-lock bag. Like all seeds he collects, permits must be issued by the host country, then the seeds are sent for inspection directly to the USDA office in Seattle which is now very familiar with his work.
“We wanted to plant woodland treasures outside the front door at ground level,” said Dan, “but it was impossible with our dogs, all those things I wanted to baby along. So we decided to do a pot wall to lift all those treasures off the ground. Robert took this project on. We found some inexpensive fibre pots, knocked the bottoms out, stained them, then erected about a 25-foot-wide wall.” A cluster of brown toothed lancewood trees (Pseudopanax ferox) from New Zealand grow here in their Dr. Seuss juvenile form.
I love the way this cubist container garden fits together, unifying the habitat for the plant treasures.
Dan meets us in the front, giving us an overall description of Windcliff and relating how the January 2024 freeze devastated parts of the garden, causing the loss of countless plants and necessitating the current replanting of certain areas.
Moving west around the house I pass a bamboo-fenced, shady alcove garden with windows into the dining room and beyond that, windows facing south to Puget Sound. As Dan has acknowledged, it was a rare opportunity to design both a garden and house at the same time. The light fixture visible through the window was inspired by the long tentacles of the giant Pacific octopus, the largest octopus species on the planet with a 20-foot arm-span, a creature that lives in the waters just off the bluff. To see a photo of the fixture from the inside, have a peek at Andrew Ritchie’s review of Dan’s book ‘Windcliff’.
This area features a stand of hardy shade ginger (Cautleya spicata), a Himalayan native. Several cultivars have been introduced, including a selection called ‘Arun Flame’, which Dan and Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones of Crug Farms in Wales discovered in eastern Nepal on a collecting trip with the American novelist Jamaica Kincaid. She wrote a 2005 memoir called “Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya” of that taxing expedition.
A small gravel garden partly enclosed by bedrock sits outside the passage to the master bedroom at right.
I turn the corner of the house and walk along flagstones towards the bluff gardens on the south side. It’s a challenge to identify plants at Windcliff but I might venture a guess that the variegated shrub above my head is Stachyurus praecox ‘Oriental Sun’.
I’m moving so quickly that I capture the delicate shadow play near my feet but neglect to look up to see what is making these patterns – likely Schefflera taiwaniana. Schefflera is one of Dan’s favourite genera – growing up in northern Michigan, he had a schefflera as a houseplant – and this species is one of the hardiest for a shady spot. (You can hear him talk about it in this Fine Gardening video.)
Coming into the sunshine, I glimpse the bluff and the water beyond through the upswept, coppery limbs of an iconic plant for gardeners in the west, a handsome manzanita (Arctostaphylos). That pretty table was created some 25 years ago for Dan by Bainbridge Island artists George Little and David Lewis.
Nearby is a bog garden with different pitcher plant species (Sarracenia spp.)
Note that lovely Yucca rostrata behind the kniphofia in the background.
A drift of Ammi visnaga near the house reminds me of the Conservatory Garden at New York’s Central Park, where I last photographed this species. It was originally designed by Lynden Miller, one of Dan’s horticultural heroes. (This is my 2016 blog on that amazing garden.)
Standing now on the ‘bluff side’, I look back at the house through a planting of red-flowered Mexican bush lobelia (Lobelia laxiflora). I think the big, lush leaves are from Eucomis pallidiflora subsp. pole-evansii, a very tall pineapple lily species which seeds around this garden.
Dan is nearby so I tell him the story of asking to photograph him at Heronswood back in September 2005, when all he really wanted to do was get to his waiting birthday cake. He graces me with a big smile, but I’m also distracted by….
…. the giant hog fennel (Peucedanum verticillare) behind him!
As a lover of colour in the garden, I’m drawn towards the lower bluff where brilliant red and scarlet crocosmias are partnered with agapanthus and rich blue Salvia patens. If you squint, you can see the skyscrapers of Seattle in the distance. And on a clear day, the view of Mount Rainier is spectacular.
The vignette is enhanced by the eucomis foliage, which will mature to yield a pineapple lily that reaches 5-6 feet in height. When the previous owners were here, they had an expansive view of Puget Sound over their summer-brown lawn. In planning his own garden, Dan wanted the view not to be an open book dominated by sky and water, but to be glimpsed through an interesting array of plants of various sizes, habits, colours and textures.
As I stand quietly in this area, a female rufous hummingbird becomes brave enough to forage in the crocosmia flowers.
See how her head feathers are brushed with the golden pollen on the anthers, which she’ll carry with her as she flits from plant to plant, ensuring that seed forms in the beautiful fruits of crocosmia?
I see splashes of orange behind the agapanthus in this section, the spikes of red-hot poker (Kniphofia) and drifts of California poppy (Eschscholzia californica).
The sweet perfume of Spanish broom (Spartium junceum) is in the air here. It’s a little dèja vu moment for me because when we were in Tuscany visiting our youngest son and daughter-in-law in late May, this Mediterranean shrub, which they call “ginestre”, was in bloom throughout the hills. In fact there was a festival of flowers in Lucignano, the village where we stayed, called “Maggiolata” which uses the yellow blossoms of the shrub as its floral motif. At the edge of the bluff on the right, you can see the native madrona tree (Arbutus menziesii) whose shimmering, copper-bronze trunk and branches inspired the colour scheme of the house and its furnishings.
Close to the bluff edge is a circular stone fire pit called the council ring. Created by Portland mosaic artist Jeffrey Bale, it features an inset stone face by sculptor Marcia Donohue.
Walking back towards the house, I see purple Jerusalem sage (Phlomis purpurea), one of many Phlomis species here. (If I am wrong, I hope to be corrected in comments.)
Then a few plants I like to call “scrim plants”. Dan has said: “I was a dinosaur when it came to the use of grasses. I was the last person in North America to appreciate grasses, but Heronswood was not a grass sort of garden. That diaphanous quality and the movement they provide to the garden is so incredibly important.” Here he uses giant feather grass (Stipa gigantea/Celtica), one of the very best grasses to use as a screen through which to glimpse other plants, like the agapanthus.
Angel’s fishing rod (Dierama pulcherrimum) creates the same screen effect in front of white-flowered Olearia cheesmanii, a New Zealand bush daisy.
A lovely, single, orange dahlia pops up throughout the bluff garden.
There are a few gravel-mulched terraces leading up to the house level here. (And can I just say I LOVE airy bamboo fences…)
This one features Salvia ‘Amistad’ with a small kniphofia.
Steps up to the house are flanked by Yucca gloriosa with soft silver sage (Salvia argentea) and a white-flowered salvia (likely S. greggii) at the base.
The terraces include a large pond and waterfall. The pond once held a collection of koi, but the local river otter put an end to the fish.
Large stepping-stones cross the pond beside a waterlily.
On the other side of the steps, the pond continues below a deck with a little viewing overlook to gaze out on the garden.
One of the family dogs (Babu?) meets me near the deck but refuses to pose. He says he’s tired of paparazzi. Fine.
A line of clay-fibre planters sits facing south, all the better for the succulents, cacti and other sun-lovers planted in them.
When I reach the deck, Dan is there, gazing out at his garden. Beyond is a grove of Dustin Gimbel’s ‘Phlomis’ ceramic sculptures.
2024 started as a difficult year for gardeners in the Pacific Northwest, who lived through several consecutive January nights of deep-freeze temperatures – as low as 15F (-10C) on Jan. 12-13 in the Seattle area. That’s when many of those tender Mediterranean and South African plants curl up their toes and die. At Windcliff, much of the shrub framework was lost, including many plants that had never been affected by cold before. When he returned home from warmer climes in February, Dan called the garden a “mass murder crime scene investigation” and laid the blame on the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. (As a Canadian, I accept the blame on behalf of the Polar Vortex, even though I think Alaska might have had a hand in the dirty work too.) In late winter, he sowed a buckwheat cover crop to smother weeds and improve the soil’s tilth, then in late April he covered the entire space, 10,000 square feet, with a 10-mil sheet of white plastic to ‘solarize’ the seeds of weedy mulleins and exotic grasses. In late September when the autumn rains begin, he’ll plant bulbs along with native plants and grasses in a “low-mow meadow”. As he said on his Facebook page with an indefatigable air of optimism: “I could not bring myself to paint between the lines of those few things that survived, so nearly 25 years later, we begin again. What an adventure!!”
Parts of the bluff-side garden have been newly planted and mulched in gravel.
I love this Chilean annual, Nolana reichei, aka “flower of seven colors”. (I counted, it’s true.)
Our stay is coming to an end but I haven’t yet seen the vegetable garden or nursery, so I head off up the east side of the house towards the greenhouse. Fragrant lilies grow here, along with phlomis.
Robert Jones is manning the sales booth and my fellow travellers are in seventh heaven selecting rare plants….
…. of all kinds. Fortunately, our bus has capacious storage space below. (Windcliff does not do mail order, but plants are available for purchase on open days, and Monrovia has a Dan Hinkley Plant Collection too.)
As a Canadian, I’m not permitted to bring plants across the border without a phytosanitary certificate, so I content myself with window shopping.
Then I head to the agapanthus beds where I see some familiar names on the plant labels, like Portland gardener Nancy Goldman….
…. and my dear Seattle friend, Sue Nevler. Said Dan of a happy day now a decade ago: “Robert and I had at last the opportunity to become married and we had a lovely party of friends coming in from all parts of the country and Europe, and we gave all the women a label and they got to go out and celebrate their favourite agapanthus seedling, and then we’ve named it for them. So there will be a lot of feminine-sounding agapanthus being introduced into cultivation in the near future.”
The perfume of sweet peas is in the air here, and I’m charmed that this sophisticated garden has devoted so much space to growing this old-fashioned annual.
Who can resist burying their nose in fragrant sweet peas?
Nearby is the vegetable garden. Said Dan in his talk at New York Botanical Garden: “It was vegetable gardening that brought me into this whole world I feel so privileged to be a part of. As a young kid, I had the family vegetable garden responsibilities and it is still now the place you’re going to find me most often, in the potager that we put in at Windcliff….something we eat from every single day of the year. That is our reason for the garden, when it comes right down to it – this opportunity to have fresh vegetables that we know precisely where they came from, how they were treated, how they were loved.”
A clay pot is overflowing with spinach.
The greenhouse offers extra heat for tomatoes, which grow side-by-side with sarracenias.
While apples ripen on a tree nearby.
It’s time for us to head to Dan & Robert’s next-door neighbours, the Brindleys, for a group portrait, an annual event at the Fling. I have just enough time as I bid farewell to snap a photo of a Mark Bulwinkle rusty iron screen.
I thought it was appropriate to include this photo in the lovely Brindley garden overlooking Puget Sound, courtesy of Becca Mathias. I am slouched in the front row, second from left. If I look happy as a clam, it’s because I’ve just spent a few hours in what passes in gardening for heaven. Thanks, Dan and Robert!
***********
Are you tired of looking at garden photos yet? No? Well, I have been fortunate to visit and blog about a few other personal gardens designed by eminent plantsmen, including:
My first visit to Heronswood was nineteen years before my recent one, on July 21, 2024 on a tour with the Garden Fling. My earlier visit was in September 2005, when I flew from Toronto to Vancouver to take my 83-year-old mother on a self-guided garden tour through the Seattle Region and Puget Sound. I was writing a weekly newspaper column then and always looking for story inspiration. We toured Bellevue Botanical Garden in Renton enroute to our bed-and-breakfast on Bainbridge Island. There we visited Bloedel Conservatory and I interviewed David Little and George Lewis at their renowned garden and sculpture studio. We also dropped in on a generously welcoming Linda Cochran at her old garden. But the highlight was our last stop at Heronswood Nursery in Kingston, on the Kitsap Peninsula. Anyone who knew anything about gardening knew that this was THE mecca for plant-lovers, with rare plants arrayed not just in the retail nursery but planted in gardens throughout its 15 forested acres. Started in 1987 when plant explorer Dan Hinkley and his partner, architect Robert Jones, laid out the paths and built their home there, the nursery business had become too all-consuming for them by the late 1990s. They found a buyer in 2000 in the big Eastern firm W. Atlee Burpee Company and its chairman George Ball, who wanted the nursery for its vast plant collection, including many rare species. (This was in those manic dot.com bubble days when every mail order catalogue looked like a great opportunity to take online – I know, I was in a similar short-lived situation.) Dan and Robert continued to work for Burpee under contract as managers and it was nearing closing time when I saw him that September day. Though he was rushing away because the staff had a cake waiting to wish him a happy birthday, he posed long enough for me to snap the photo below.
What happened nine months after my visit is well-known. In June 2006 Burpee boss George Ball, having discovered that plants that thrive in the Pacific rainforest do not necessarily grow in gardens in the Midwest, closed the nursery. The garden was kept minimally maintained and opened three days annually to visitors via the Garden Conservancy. In 2012 Burpee sold the garden and nursery for an undisclosed amount via a sealed bid to the local Port Gamble S’Klallam tribe, which continues to manage it today as the non-profit Heronswood Botanical Garden with Dan Hinkley as Director Emeritus. The Woodland Garden is as lush and beautiful in mid-summer as it ever was, so let’s take a walk through it to be begin our tour.
I like the big lacecap inflorescences of Hydrangea serrata ‘Macrophylla’, below, which taxonomically is an intriguing mashup of two species names.
It feels humbling to walk through an old Pacific Northwest forest, with its towering Douglas firs and hemlocks. I note the giant Himalayan lily (Cardiocrinum giganteum) already forming seeds near the Japanese hydrangea vine (Schizophragma molle), right.
Schizophragmamolle can reach up to 40 feet (12 metres) in height, climbing via aerial rootlets.
There is an impressive collection of hydrangeas and their kin in the Woodland Garden. This gold-variegated lacecap is H. serrata ‘O Amacha Nishiki).
It takes me a while to figure out what plant is in fruit under the leaning Aruncus dioicus ‘Kneiffii’ here: Paris quadrifolia.
I stop to admire this trio of Little & Lewis pillars topped with pots of trailing ivy.
Another beautiful hydrangea, H. macrophylla f. normalis ‘Veitchii’, bred by the English nursery of the same name in the early 1900s.
Lovely Anemenopsis macrophylla ‘White Swan’ is a new one for me (and if my knees were better I might have knelt to photograph it from below…..)
The juxtaposition of the big trees and the shade-loving hydrangeas and other woodlanders is inspiring for gardeners who complain about shade limiting their choices.
A thalictrum bends gracefully over other leaning plants.
Then it’s into the Formal Gardens via the iconic Arched Hornbeam Hedge, sculpted from Carpinus betulus ‘Fastigiata’.
This is one of the original Heronswood gardens and it looks as beautiful today as when I saw it in 2005.
It surrounds a lily pool edged with carnivorous pitcher plants (Sarracenia spp). Stone benches offer a place to sit and reflect.
The far side of the Hornbeam Hedge garden is adjacent to the Formal Potager.
When I was here 19 years ago, the Potager Garden was filled with vegetables.
Today, a combination of annuals and perennials fill the box-lined spaces.
This is my favourite view because the axis leads to the fountain focal point.
It is filled with Nepeta racemosa ‘Walker’s Low’, a popular catmint.
I recall this whimsical Little & Lewis chanterelle sink fountain from my first visit here. It’s surrounded by a brilliant chartreuse planting of Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Golden Arrow.
Flower beds line the outer paths in the Potager and feature lovely combinations, like this Ligularia przewalskii with Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firetail’.
I realize in looking closer that every stem of the wine-leaved plant has been cut. Is this a Chelsea chop to keep it smaller and bushier? Or does Heronswood have plant-pruning deer like I do?
A beautiful mix in one of the perimeter borders includes a cloud of bronze fennel.
The luscious Orienpet hybrid lily ‘Silk Road’ consorts nicely with yellow Hypericum x inodorum ‘Ysella’ and a malva of some sort.
It’s easy to look at the ‘forest’ of a garden and forget all the ‘trees’, like this humble annual love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena) with its complex structure.
Thalictrum adds an airy lilac cloud to the yellow heliopsis.
So many lilies! (Possibly L. regale?) If you can keep them free of red lily beetle (I cannot in Toronto, despite my efforts), they are the perfumed stars of the July garden.
On the way towards the formal garden surrounding the building that was once Dan and Robert’s house, I find a stand of hardy ginger (Roscoea purpurea) from the Himalayas. The last time I saw these was at RBG Edinburgh!
A path leads through shrubs and various beds….
…. past a raised gravel garden filled with drought-tolerant plants….
…. like what I think is Sedum album ‘Coral Carpet’.
Near the house is an eye-catching combination of a golden redbud (Cercis spp.) and blue agapanthus.
There are more Orienpet (Oriental x Trumpet hybrid) lilies near the tent where we pick up our catered lunches. The tent had been in use for a wedding, one of the ways photogenic Heronswood now generates revenue, along with admission fees, lectures and plant sales.
A long pergola hosts numerous types of vines.
Near our lunch table is a bouquet that looks like the work of Riz Reyes, Assistant Director.
No sooner do I snap a photo than I see Riz himself – and he offers to pose next to Heronswood’s “it” plant, Lilium ‘Zeba’. In fact, Riz wrote an essay for Fine Gardening magazine on this very lily, the product of a cross between L. nepalense and L. ‘Kushi Maya’, itself an L. nepalense-Oriental cross.
Here it is in combination with Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firetail’ – don’t they make fine music together?
The lush beds in the formal gardens near the house feature ornamental grasses, perennials, towering trumpet lilies and agapanthus.
An empty urn acts as focal point here.
Time is fleeting on our stay here so I finish lunch and head towards the new, ecologically-focused gardens near the entrance. I do love a meadow and this one near the S’Klallum Connections Garden features a pair of native Washington state annuals, blue-headed gilia, Gilia capitata with pink farewell-to-spring, Clarkia amoena (aka godetia). Interestingly, this is the second time I’ve seen Gilia capitata used in a meadow this season – the first time in Nigel Dunnett’s seed-mix for the wildflower moat at the Tower of London, which I blogged about recently.
The S’Klallum Connections Garden is still being developed but it promises to tell a powerful story about the relationship between the tribe and the land.
It will use the garden to tell stories, actual stories.
There are wetlands…
…. and native forest plants like salal (Gaultheria shallon). Florists know this shrub as a glossy, green filler for bouquets, but for Native Americans it is a food and medicinal plant. Other traditional plants in the garden include camas, soapberry and sweet-grass.
Sword fern (Polystichum munitum) is no less beautiful for being common in the woods.
The S’Klallum Connections Garden has a very quiet, naturalistic feeling.
An old totem pole has come to the end of its journey and is “resting” now in the garden, being allowed to return to the earth.
The Traveller’s Garden is another new space intended to highlight plants that reach the garden through the exploits of plant explorers. As the website says: “Heronswood is well known for its rare plants, obtained around the world and the Traveler’s Garden, still under construction, tells the tale of plant hunters, what they do and how they do it. Follow in their footsteps and lose yourself in a Chilean forest, on a Vietnamese peak, or in the American West.”
Speaking of Vietnam, one of the interpretive signs in this area features founder Dan Hinkley rejoicing at the summit of the tallest mountain in that country. If you want to read Dan’s essay on his ascent to this peak, it’s here on his website.
Himalayan hydrangea (H. heteromalla) is one of the uncommon plants in the Traveler’s Garden.
With the buses arriving to take us back to Tacoma, I run to the Renaissance Garden adjacent to the parking lot but just have time to snap a quick shot through the alders. As the website says: “Sheltered amongst mossy logs, this garden tells of the interaction between nature and the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe through a recreation of an abandoned logging camp. Initially developed in 2018, it contains over 250 different types of ferns together with other shade-loving plants under a canopy of western red cedar, a tree of significant cultural importance to the tribe”.
As I leave this garden, I spot a sign that reminds me of my youngest grandson, the “salamander-whisperer”.
Between the parking lot and the Woodland Garden is a lovely container that needs its moment in the spotlight.
I take a few minutes to walk around Heronswood’s Gift Shop/Ticket Office….
…. where the raised garden contains some treasures, including lovely Lilium ‘Zeba….
…. the mangave (Agave)‘Mission to Mars’…
…. and Peruvian lily, Alstroemeria isabellana.
Heronswood’s director Dr. Ross Bayton, below, is particularly fond of another new space near the entrance that’s still being developed….
…. the Rock Garden. It includes “five rocky islands, each studded with miniature treasures that grow at high elevation. The garden currently showcases alpine plants from North America’s western mountains and southwestern deserts but will expand to include other regions plus Mediterranean landscapes.” The yellow plant is sundrops, Calylophus berlandieri.
Included is a small bog devoted to carnivorous native plants like California pitcher plant, aka cobra lily, Darlingtonia californica….
…. and western false asphodel, Triantha occidentalis, recently found to uptake nitrogen through insects that get trapped by its sticky stem hairs.
The Rock Garden has a poignant dedication sign.
The time we’ve had at Heronswood has been generous – if not nearly enough to see all its treasures. But I’m so happy I got back after 19 years to see for myself that the garden is once again in excellent hands.
