Heronswood

 The border at the front of the house at Heronswood. May 2013

 The pond near the house. May 2013

The kitchen garden, or potager.  This is an excellent use of the formal style to contain vegetables & give structure to a kitchen garden.  In gardens such as this, there are echoes of baroque France.

This is a folly in the woodland garden. The structure, which is part fountain & part Greek temple with a definite air of ruination, was built in a style popular in gardens during the late 1980s & early 1990s in the Seattle area.  It falls into the category of postmodern architecture.  If it remains, I'm sure it will be interesting from a historical perspective.

 Hosta & Ferns. May 2013

Kniphofia northiae, one of the uncommon plants to be found at Heronswood. May 2013

 

Thanks to Max P. for identifying this as Symphytum x uplandicum 'Axminster Gold'  There are no plant tags at Heronswood.

Heronswood is quite a famous place among plant enthusiasts in the Seattle area & known around the world by horticulturalists familiar with the botanical collections of Dan Hinkley, who established the gardens & a nursery with his partner Robert Jones on 15 acres on the Kitsap Peninsula outside of Kingston, WA in 1987.  They lived in a house on the property.  The gardens have been featured internationally as an example of creative, environmentally sensitive & botanically impressive garden design.

The garden & nursery business were bought by the W. Atlee Burpee Company for close to $4.5 million in 2000.  Burpee closed the garden in 2006 & moved many of the nursery plants to sites on the east coast.  The Heronswood botanical garden and Heronswood Nursery Company was sold to the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe in 2012.  Burpee originally asked $11 million for the property.  The tribe bought it for less than $1 million.

In 2001, Valerie Easton wrote for the Seattle Times: Last summer, gardeners gasped over the sale of homegrown Heronswood to W. Atlee Burpee. It seemed an unlikely union. Heronswood has a worldwide reputation for being first with "gotta-have-it" plants, while Burpee's image is as stodgy as the familiar annuals and vegetable seed it has offered for 125 years. But why would Heronswood, with all its success and even adulation, join forces with Burpee? Hinkley says they weren't looking to sell, but explains, "Robert and I were drowning in the responsibilities of this thing we had created . . . there was no down time."

Hinkley and Jones plan to make good use of that newfound time. They'll continue to manage the nursery. Jones, an architect, is designing a new house, where they look forward to having a smaller, private garden. Hinkley is scheduled to give 57 talks in several countries this year, hopes to finish the three books he is writing, and plans to devote more time to expeditions. He'll journey twice to Europe and Japan this spring and then to Nepal or southeast Tibet in the autumn, bringing back yet more plants to excite us.

In 2006, Anne Raver wrote for the New York Times: On May 30, the Heronswood Nursery gardens in Kingston, Wash., the horticultural paradise that Daniel J. Hinkley and Robert Jones started 19 years ago with a single truckload of rare plants — which eventually grew into a collection that would change the face of American gardening — were closed by W. Atlee Burpee & Company, the nursery's corporate owner. Mr. Hinkley said in a telephone interview that George Ball, Burpee's C.E.O., and three of his staff members came that day from Burpee's Pennsylvania properties to dismiss Mr. Hinkley and most of the nursery's 24 employees. 

Mr. Hinkley said that there had been early signs of trouble after Burpee bought Heronswood six years ago, but that the nursery had continued to operate pretty much as it had. Still, he said, he and Mr. Jones spent "six years waiting for the crash you know is coming." Mr. Ball said the move is a business matter. "We are moving the nursery, not closing it, because it was losing money," he said by phone on Saturday from Fordhook Farm, the Burpee homestead and testing grounds, in Doylestown, Pa., where 1,000 of Heronswood's 6,000 plants had been moved over the past few years. Thousands of others will be moved to a 50-acre site in Willow Hill, Pa., and a 30-acre site in Selbyville, Del. 

Thomas C. Cooper, the former longtime editor of Horticulture magazine, who has known Mr. Hinkley and Mr. Jones for years, said he sees Burpee's decision as a mistake. "This is not a brand like Tide, where you can swap out C.E.O.'s and move corporate headquarters and the brand goes on," he said. "There is no Heronswood without Dan and Robert." The Heronswood catalog, a 250-page list of thousands of plants with cliffhanging reports of Mr. Hinkley's latest plant-collecting adventures in the Himalayas or South America, had a huge cult following. 

"It wasn't a profitable business when we bought it," Mr. Ball said. (Mr. Hinkley said he and Mr. Jones made a decent living from Heronswood, but acknowledged that at times they had to subsidize it from their own pockets to make winter payrolls.) "But I bought it for the plants," Mr. Ball continued, "to get rare and unusual plants into mainstream gardening," with the idea that this strategy would eventually pay off. Within six months of the Heronswood sale in 2000, Mr. Hinkley said, "the expectations changed." 

Business was so bad, Mr. Ball said, that in 2003, he asked the former owners to buy Heronswood back for $2 million. At that point, Mr. Hinkley said, he and Mr. Jones could not afford even that price. Mr. Ball said Heronswood's gardens — 5½ acres of the garden, as distinct from the business Burpee is moving — will not be depleted even as the best specimens are taken for propagation and testing. "I would like to find some kind of buyer who would keep it open to the public," Mr. Ball said. He pictures a "high-end retirement community, with nice condos" built around the gardens on the 15-acre Heronswood property.

According to Heronswood.com, maintained by the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe, the property was purchased during the summer of 2012. Since then, volunteers have worked to restore the garden under the direction of Dan Hinkley. The Port Gamble S'Klallam Foundation is responsible for ensuring that the garden's integrity is maintained while managing community events & activities, such as plant sales, open garden days & other fundraising efforts to benefit the gardens.  The garden had been closed to the public since 2006. The situation seemed sad and hopeless until the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe took ownership of the property and they quickly moved forward with plans to restore this botanical treasure.  The Port Gamble S'Klallam Reservation is located not far from Heronswood.

Heronswood opened to the public for the 1st time in 7 years on May 18, 2013.  As you might expect, the gardens don't look as nice as they once did.  I haven't been there since before it was sold in 2000.  But the place was not a disappointment.  One would hope to see steady improvement in the future.