The Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island in Washington State is a unique public green space, often referred to as both a garden and an arboretum. The word reserve is defined as a tract of land set aside for special use. The 150 acre sanctuary is not a place of formal flower gardens, but it is a garden created by an exceptional couple who lived in a French country-style house overlooking Puget Sound. Surrounded by forested lands, they worked to discover a way to arrange the plants to create a place where “one can come for a walk in the woods.”
Category: Interior West Region, US
Is This A Garden?
“What makes gardens especially interesting is that making one constitutes creation of a new world–our own world.” – American Eden, Wade Graham
Contemplating Trees
The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is now. – Chinese Proverb
Arbor Day in the U.S is celebrated on the last Friday in April. In Arizona, we have many good times to plant trees scattered throughout the year so this date is a bit arbitrary in our region. Still it is a significant day to contemplate trees. The Arbor Day Foundation’s mission is to encourage us to Plant, Nurture and Celebrate Trees.
Gardeners Change the World
A Small Garden
The Anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world.” Substitute “committed gardeners” in this thought and the results DO change our world in immeasurable ways. Master Gardener Park in Port Townsend, WA demonstrates the power of passionate committed gardeners. The city’s smallest park, a small triangular shaped patch of earth bordered on all sides by intersecting streets, is now a beautiful garden.
Garden Gates
Enter Into The New
As the new year stretches out before us fresh and full of possibilities many of us pause to mark the transition with resolutions, lucky foods and personal traditions. These actions help frame our expectation of what the new year will bring. We approach the new year nearly holding our breath in anticipation of what will come.
The Best Season
Expectations
Friends planning a visit to a new garden struggled to pick the best time to go, wanting the garden to be at its’ peak perfection. Predicting the weather, wondering if it would rain, if the climate would be just right for the flowers to bloom they struggled to match their schedules to the hoped for perfect visit. Poet William Brown wrote “There is no season such delight can bring as summer, autumn, winter, spring.” When is the best season to visit a public garden? When will the garden reach its’ perfection? Whenever you get yourself to a garden, I believe you can find something good.
Hidden Gardens
A fall trip to Montana found me searching for high country gardens to visit. Montana is a state of 145,552 square miles and my garden guides identify 4 gardens for the entire state and none were within 500 miles of my destination! Disappointed I decided this trip would not include wandering through gardens. Garden Guides are useful but certainly not all encompassing because many hidden gardens await if you keep looking as you travel.
Noticing Trees
I’m sitting in a tree house at a friend’s cabin along the Gallatin River near Yellowstone Park in Montana. There is sun filtering through the branches of pines landing on spots of grass and wild roses , now late in the season, the branches are red spotted with rose hips. I’m in a tree house. I didn’t have a tree house when I was a kid though I think I remember my brothers pounding a couple of boards up in the crotch of a maple tree in our back yard.
Yet my childhood was filled with trees. In the Hoosier Midwest farmland there were maples, oak, hickory, walnut, tulip, cherry, apple and pear and more. Trees viewed by a child seem tall and permanent. These trees filled my childhood with all kinds of activity. Trees provided branches for swords, and scepters of power, whirligigs for musical kazoos, nuts for cracking, fruits for treats. I climbed in trees, sat under trees and sometime read under trees, leaning against the textured trunk for a backrest.
I collected 20 different leaves, pressing them flat and labeling them to identify their uniqueness for an 8th grade science project. In the branches overhead birds raise their babies, our cats climbed up to terrorize them, and life and death drama appeared right in the middle of a summer day.