Lakewood Playground

Lakewood Playground in September 2013

The charm of the Lakewood Playground lies in its small scale in a quiet neighborhood in southeast Seattle.  It has the appearance of a village green, surrounded by attractive homes in this prosperous area on the shore of Lake Washington.  Lakewood is unfamiliar to many people even in Seattle, or is thought to be a part of the Seward Park neighborhood, which it borders to the north.  The park covers 2 acres with a play area, restrooms, soccer & baseball/softball fields.  It is located at 5013 S Angeline Street.  Angeline Street was named after Princess Angeline, the daughter of Chief Seattle.  She was born nearby in a longhouse of the Duwamish Tribe on Lake Washington.

Lakewood was originally a peninsula on the western shore of Lake Washington, formed by a long inlet called Wetmore Slough (the present location of Genesee Park) that extended more than half a mile south from the lake & turned west toward Columbia City.  The thick forest provided the cedar trees that the Duwamish used for their longhouses, but the tribe does not appear to have established a permanent camp here. During summer months, families erected shelters woven from cattails on the shore of the lake where they caught fish and dug roots. During the winter, they lived in elaborate longhouses on Pritchard Island, not far to the south.  Not until a bridge carried Lake Washington Boulevard S across the mouth of the slough in 1912 & a trolley line opened on S Genesee Street did the community gain good communication with the rest of the city.  This information comes from Seattle Neighborhoods: Lakewood at HistoryLink.org.

Jim Ellis Freeway Park

Freeway Park in September 2013

Jim Ellis Freeway Park opened to the public on July 4, 1976.  It was built on a lid over the Interstate 5 freeway along the the Washington State Convention Center, to which it connects.  At 5.2 acres, it is by far the largest park in Downtown Seattle.  It was designed by the San Francisco Bay Area landscape architecture firm Lawrence Halprin & Associates under the design direction of Angela Danadjieva.  The park is dominated by a huge waterfall set among a series of plazas that are linked & enclosed by concrete planters, walls & smaller water features.  This is a very well-designed park with pleasant open spaces, plenty of shade from mature trees & a broad walkway that runs throughout.  There are benches & small lawns for sitting & reclining. It's a good place for a picnic lunch. The park & especially the waterfall are among the most interesting features of Downtown Seattle.  You can find the park at 700 Seneca Street.

For the first few years of its existence, Freeway Park was considered a success. It was architecturally & structurally innovative. It also showed how to make the most use out of limited urban space. Landscape architects from throughout the world came to see it.  It became popular with area employees & residents.  But over the years, the park became a bit seedy.  Vegetation matured & cut sight lines.  The park became darker & more difficult to navigate. The homeless became frequent park users.  Drug dealing was a problem. Security patrols were improved & illegal activity lessened. Concrete walls were reduced & trees were pruned to open up views & add more daylight.  There was general improvement of overgrown & deteriorated landscaping.  And all of those big trees are a welcome sight in the urban core.  I highly recommend a visit.
 

Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park

Basalt rocks from ancient lava flows

Erigeron (fleabane)

Artemisia tridentata (big sagebrush)

Plants of the Sagebrush Steppe

Petrified elm.  All photos were taken in October 2012

Click here for more photos of Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park.

Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park covers 7,470 acres in central Washington near the Columbia River north of Vantage.  The trail here is a 3-mile loop through an ecosystem known as Sagebrush Steppe, a highly xeric community of plants including big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) bitter-brush (Purshia tridentata) parsnip-flowered buckwheat (Eriogonum heracleoides) gray ball sage (Salvia dorrii) & bluebunch wheatgrass (Agropyron spicatum).  In October, the landscape was especially dry, although I was surprised to find some of the sagebrush in bloom.

15 million years ago, this area was filled with swamps & shallow lakes surrounded by forests. Swamp cypress grew on the edges of the lakes. Ginkgo, maple, walnut, oak, sycamore, and horse chestnut grew on the hillsides.  Douglas fir, hemlock, & spruce grew nearby at higher elevations. Logs became buried in mud. 10 to 15 million years ago, lava floods spread over the area from fissures in the earth, covering the logs & allowing them to petrify. 15,000 years ago, during the last ice age, an ice sheet blocked the Clark Fork River & created Glacial Lake Missoula.  Periodically, the ice dam would fail, resulting in large floods that rushed down the Columbia River drainage, through the Columbia River Gorge & out to the Pacific Ocean. These floods exposed the petrified logs. Highway workers began finding petrified wood in 1927 while working on the Vantage Road. Crews from a federal Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Vantage began extensive excavations in 1936. The park was opened to the public in 1938.
 

August in Seattle

From top to bottom: summer squash, cherry tomato, purple broccoli, sunflower & chard.  These are all good choices for Seattle gardens.  Very large tomatoes ripen late in the season, if at all.  Cherry tomatoes produce much earlier.  Chard was bountiful this year.  All photos were taken at the Rainier Vista Sunrise Garden.

August 2014 in Seattle was significantly warmer & wetter than usual.  The mean temperature was 69.1F/20.6C, a full 3 degrees higher than normal.  Total precipitation was 1.81 inches/45.97mm, 0.93 inches/23.62mm more than normal.  The highest temperature was 96F/35.6C on 8/11, the lowest 52F/11.1C on 8/21.  There were 3 days with rain, 10 days with light rain, 1 day with hail, 9 days with fog (2 with visibility at less than 1/4 mile) 7 cloudy days, 14 partly cloudy days & 10 fair days.  The good thing about August 2014 was that there were only 5 days over 85F/29.4C degrees.  The extra rain helped keep the landscape green & lush.  Things usually begin to turn brown in August.   

Picardo Farm P-Patch

Picardo Farm P-Patch in September

Picardo Farm P-Patch in September

Picardo Farm P-Patch in September

Picardo Farm P-Patch in September

Picardo Farm P-Patch in September

Picardo Farm P-Patch is the oldest community garden in Seattle.  The P in p-patch stands for Picardo.  The Picardo family, Italian immigrants who arrived in Seattle in the 1890s, bought this property in 1922 in what had been the Ravenna Swamp & farmed it until 1962.  The swamp was essentially a peat bog & the soil here remains exceptionally rich in organic matter.  It is one of only 2 historical farms preserved in the City of Seattle.  This p-patch & the p-patch program were established in 1973.  There are 302 plots on 98,000 square feet owned by the Seattle Department of Parks & Recreation.  It is located in the Wedgwood neighborhood of northeast Seattle along 25th Avenue NE between NE 80th & 82nd Streets. 

In 2013, resistance to the new policy limiting the size of individual plots was centered at Picardo Farm.  It was said that one gardener there had more than 2,000 square feet of space, 10x the size of the average plot.  The P-Patch Program sets maximum & minimum plot size for each p-patch based on 2 criteria, the average wait for a plot & the p-patch size. In December 2013, 45 gardeners in 13 gardens (2% of all gardeners) had to reduce plot sizes.  Plot sizes are generally 50 to 200 square feet.

Carmelita Street in San Francisco

Waller Street at the corner of Carmelita Street.

Carmelita Street in San Francisco in April 2014.

Carmelia Street is my favorite street in San Francisco.  I used to live not far from here in the Lower Haight & just a bit farther away at Alamo Square.  My preferred hotel, the Metro Hotel, is very near Carmelita Street, which serves as a major pedestrian thoroughfare to & from the N Judah Muni Metro light rail train stop at the top of Duboce Park, & between the Castro & the Lower Haight.  The N Judah will take you all the way from the Embarcadero to Ocean Beach.  Carmelita Street is about half a block long between Waller Street & Duboce Park.  There is no outlet at the Duboce Park end of the street for vehicular traffic, but a pedestrian path across the park.  The 16 houses on Carmelita Street are all good examples of San Francisco Edwardian architecture from about 1900 to 1910, & all very nicely maintained.  In addition, the gardens along the street are exceptionally lovely.  The one fully landscaped driveway is wonderful.  It serves as a parking space.  We can all learn something from that.

Bellevue Botanical Garden

The Ravine Experience at the Bellevue Botanical Garden August 2012

The Yao Japanese Garden at the Bellevue Botanical Garden August 2012 

The Alpine Rock Garden at the Bellevue Botanical Garden August 2012

The Northwest Perennial Alliance Border at the Bellevue Botanical Garden August 2012

The Northwest Perennial Alliance Border at the Bellevue Botanical Garden August 2012

Click here for more photos of the Bellevue Botanical Garden.

The Bellevue Botanical Garden is an amazing place.  And even more amazing, it gets better all the time.  This is certainly one of the largest & best gardens in the Seattle area, which has rather few impressive public gardens.  One 53 acres, there are gardens, natural woodlands & wetlands.  Most impressive of the gardens is the Perennial Border maintained by the The Northwest Perennial Alliance.  The Yao Garden is also quite impressive, one of the best Japanese gardens in the Seattle area.  In addition to these, there is also an Alpine Rock Garden, the Waterwise Garden, the Shorts Ground Cover Garden, & the Native Discovery Garden.  The newest feature (as of 2012) is the Ravine Experience, a footbridge suspended over a ravine in the native woodland.  You have a rare opportunity here to see a small portion of the native wetlands that once covered most of lowland King County.

Sidewalk Garden on SW Juneau Street

Berberis thunbergii, Grevillea victoriae & Nassella tenuissima on SW Juneau Street in August 2013

Callistemon (Bottlebrush) & Berberis (Barberry) on SW Juneau Street in August 2013

Rudbeckia hirta (Black-eyed Susan) on SW Juneau Street in August 2013

This is one of the most interesting sidewalk gardens I have seen in Seattle.  It is remarkable for its use of uncommon plants such as Grevillea victoriae, Callistemon (Bottlebrush) & an unusual species of Berberis (Barberry) that I can't identify.  It is tied together with Festuca ovina var. glauca 'Elijah Blue' (Blue Fescue) Nassella tenuissima (Mexican Feather Grass) & a number of groundcovers including Hebe glaucophylla.  This is not exactly what the Seattle Department of Transportation would like to see done in a sidewalk garden.  They insist that plants be kept to no more than 3 feet in height for visibility & traffic safety.  (Trees are the exception to this rule, but require permits.)  The shrubs here have grown higher than 3 feet & will grow much higher still, if they are not cut back, which would be rather unattractive.  In my opinion, it is better to plant shrubs that don't grow much more than 3 feet tall, especially on a corner, where they will certainly block views of traffic.

July in Seattle

These Capitol Hill homes were built around 1910.  They are called Seattle boxes, or foursquare houses.

Hydrangea macrophylla

 Allium by the alley.  The photos above were taken on Capitol Hill in July 2014.

Mostly roses & Hydrangea macrophylla at this dutch colonial house in University Park, built around 1920.

July 2014 in Seattle was significantly warmer & slightly wetter than normal. The mean temperature was 69.2F/20.7C.  The normal mean temperature is 65.7F/18.7C.  Total precipitation was 0.77 inches/19.6mm, 0.76 inches/19.3mm fell on 7/23.  Normal precipitation is 0.70 inches/17.8mm.  The highest temperature was 94F/34.4C on 7/1.  The lowest was 53F/11.7C on 7/18.  There were 10 days at 85F/29.4C or above, which is hot for Seattle.  There was 1 day with heavy rain, 1 day with rain, 3 days with light rain, 7 days with fog (1 with visibility at less than 1/4 mile) 6 cloudy days, 11 partly cloudy days & 14 fair days.       
 

Angel Morgan P-Patch

 Rockery & tool shed at the Angel Morgan P-Patch in August 2013

Tool shed at the Angel Morgan P-Patch in August 2013

Grape arbor at the Angel Morgan P-Patch in August 2013

The Angel Morgan P-Patch is a very pleasant surprise to find in the quiet residential heart of the Brighton neighborhood in the Rainier Valley of Seattle.  It has a lot going on.  There is tool shed made stylish with an attached trellis, a rockery filled with perennials, espaliered fruit trees & a grape arbor, all in good condition.  Most of the 26 plots are well-tended.  This p-patch covers 22,650 square feet on land owned by the City of Seattle on 42nd Avenue S, between S Morgan Street & S Angel Place.  It was established in 2004.