Heronswood Garden: Connecting Plants and Peoples

It’s telling that I’ve not posted much before about Heronswood on this site, but my reasons for that are complicated, personal, and to be honest, I’ve deeply enjoyed sitting back to witness and observe the changes which have taken place there over the last decade. I love the direction the garden is heading in, and greatly admire what the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe and the garden team at Heronswood Garden are doing as they weave together many varied things on their land.

It’s a great honor to be included in the lineup of speakers again this year at Heronswood Garden. I’ll be speaking in-person on Saturday, September 28 (2024) from 10am to 1pm about “Bodacious Begonias”. (If you’d like to register or learn more about it please click here.) It will include Dan Hinkley’s collections in the garden, my thoughts on growing “hardy” begonias, as well as a few others you can find in cultivation, and lastly, some of my favorite non-hardy begonias.

The topic means a lot to me as a professional horticulturist, amateur botanist, and as an individual who has gone through training with the American Begonia Society to become a budding begonia judge. I’m not sure why I like begonias so much, but I think it’s safe to say that begonias found me—I didn’t find them. They came to me in the form of thinking about the collection of begonias kept by my former employer, Cistus Design Nursery, in the back corner of a greenhouse.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t already like begonias a lot, it’s just that’s when I started to dive deeper into my interest, thinking more about where they’d all come from, and who’d brought them here, and why, and how they were introduced into the United States—eventually coming into commerce. As I learned more, I became curious about older hybrids and how they’d gone through this process too. Honestly, this interest led to my wanting to become a more serious horticulturist.

So for this, I thank them. I now very much better understand how many different plants enter into commerce, but that’s a whole different post…

So for now, with the begonias out of the way, let’s take another step back, and come with me as I take you through my own, very abstract, Heronswood journey.

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Ok, so let’s begin with the complicated bit. The legacy of Dan Hinkley is a lot for anyone to take in, and getting to know his accomplishments has been a bit overwhelming. I know many people in my own region, and around the country, who admire him more than virtually anyone else, and for me, a born iconoclast, I’ve spent years kind of smashing away at all of that, and I think I’m in a good place now.

Dan and I first met at a sale during an HPSO study weekend in 2016 and we had several brief interactions after that at sales or when he visited the nursery where I worked. Some encounters left me confused, others made me crack up. I very much enjoy enigmatic comments, and Dan has given me plenty now, but what I’ve enjoyed the most is just laughing with him.

But back at that time in 2016 when we met face-to-face, I’d only seen Heronswood once, I’d never read his books since my swelling disease made reading incredibly difficult, and I only knew some of his collections and the plant families he was interested in—but not deeply. Mostly, I’d just come to realize over time, how many people had worked for him, and trained under his tutelage as horticulturists. When someone said to me that they’d worked at Heronswood, that meant something.

So I came into the legacy of Dan Hinkley late. I first visited the site of Dan and Robert’s former home Heronswood Garden and Nursery in June of 2012. At that time, I was in the middle of a painful divorce, and as I walked alone in the rain crying, I thought about how the land was in the process of being purchased by the tribe from Burpee, and what that might mean to them. I hoped it felt like a kind of healing, but what did I know? Maybe what I felt was a bit crazy, but maybe not.

I know that day, wandering around there alone, was very different than my visits since.

What I saw was a bit of a mess, but I enjoyed it none the less. There were still a lot of fun plants to see, and the echos of so many people and the stories I felt all around me that day. Humans depend upon plants in so many ways, and to share plants with one another, we often turn to stories. I likely sound a bit woo woo to many of you when I say this, but the garden at that time, during that visit, felt a bit haunted to me in some way. So many people from horticulture had passed through that space I imagined I felt their echos. It was likely just my feeling so overwhelmed, but it left an impression for sure.

I think part of me wanted my story to intertwine there, but it took many years for that to happen. I felt like the mote of dust that you can barely see during that first visit. I think I felt a bit crushed by the overwhelming importance of the place in my world of plants, but I also was a broken woman at that exact moment in my life. I felt desperately behind others my age, so I shut off those thoughts, and simply walked and took photos.

I knew I’d be back, but I had no idea where my life was going. Not long after that I started my first nursery job, and then I met Dan at a plant sale. I didn’t returned to Heronswood for many years. The next time was during the pandemic with my friend Theo.

But during that first visit in 2012 I was a bit of an unkempt, slightly feral mess. So yes, overall, the garden appealed to me. But I also felt I was out of my league, a wannabe, and way over my head. I questioned a lot about the legacy of plant exploration, and I didn’t like how I felt when I left.

So I drove there to search my heart and soul for an answer about what to do with my life. Again, this was all complicated. That first visit was emotional and painful. But I went to the woods, as I always do in extremely difficult times, to search myself. I learned how to do this as a child, because of a dream I’d had that’s been the wellspring of my entire life. It has somehow always kept me on the right path, and it led me to Heronswood that day.

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And now for the more personal part of my experiences there.

That day, and during ensuing years, I’ve thought a lot about the many tribes in our region and their relationships to the natural world, and to the connection with plants I’ve fostered since I was a girl.

I grew up in a family that earned a privileged life because of recreational fishing for salmon and steelhead, with a father who told us stories about his family going to the Columbia River Gorge to buy fish from tribal fishermen, and of seeing Celilo Falls as a boy. I grew up learning a lot about tribal fishing rights, the many legal fights, and I’ve become an adult who believes that the Chinook Indian Nation needs to be recognized. I was taught geography by learning river drainages, and I learned about native plant ecology because of growing up along streams.

But I am a white woman of European descent and have watched so many things with discomfort… We’ll stop at cultural appropriation and the strange legacy of being an Oregon Trail descendant. My family still farms on land “given” to them in the 1850s. Land taken from others.

I also grew up with my Aunt T, who lived with my grandparents in Hoquiam, Washington near the Olympic Peninsula from the time she was a toddler until her passing as an adult. She was medically fragile after a severe beating by her non-tribal father led to a lobotomy. T was never legally adopted because her family wanted her to remain a tribal member, so we shared the joy that was T together. It’s something I very rarely say out loud out of respect for both she, and the painful experience her family went through sharing her with us, but I loved my Aunt T. Because of that foster care experience, I also learned about fetal alcohol syndrome, and then during the 1990s, like many others, I began to read about the lives of many native people across the US as an English major earning my BA degree. My shelves were filled with books written by writers such as: Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie.

Powwow Highway is still one of my favorite movies.

And before my divorce, I discovered the family history in Wyoming of my ex-mother-in-law who had been adopted. My ex and I even drove there and visited what was once the family homestead on the Wind River, on the reservation, where a white man married a Northern Shoshone woman, and became part of an ugly part of our history. The President of the US gave him a lot of land for his part in what happened. But that is not my story to tell either… though it, like all of this, informs who I am.

All of this led me to better understand intersectionality, and even what being Italian-American means. I’ve taken all of these lessons over the years, and have thought long and hard about how they’re applicable to me.

Lastly, there was also the experience this year of my classmate C, who is a Klamath tribal member. He was in the same horticulture program, wanting to bridge the gap between traditional plant knowledge and Western horticulture. I’m grateful that he was generous enough to sit and talk with me after classes about what a place like Heronswood can now mean to someone like him, to his children, and to someone like me. He believes in a future where we can work together, but it will take time, and small steps.

In preparing for my upcoming talk, I asked him how I should approach talking about the collections from abroad. He’d never really thought about it from a tribal perspective, let alone from the perspective of another tribe, but we had many ongoing brief conversations about it over the last year, and those have helped me to see things in a new light. He’s also very supportive of the idea of new narratives as well, but we both just laughed when we imagined what that will look like now. I’m always onboard for some iconoclastic reimagining of the stories we know and tell ourselves, not like rewriting history, but instead growing beyond the old models we’ve outgrown. Our talks had me thinking a lot these past months about finding my voice. I can only assume it did the same for C. I know that he’d like to go to Heronswood and learn more about the tribe and their work.

I often listened to things others said to him, and it was not always easy. But I sat with him, and listened to how he felt about things after class too. His advice was always to know yourself, where you come from, and to be strong when you bring something to the table. We also discussed the place of the elders, and not pushing too hard, but being patient with the process as you grow and learn. Your time will come.

I don’t even know what this all even means for the future, but even the hint of change from the old paradigm has sparked my curiosity, so I sit and listen to what’s going on all around me, and I write things down.

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So maybe I wanted to be the first blogger to post about Heronswood—especially the Renaissance Garden—before the Puget Sound: WA Fling arrives there later this week. For this is an intersectional garden, a space made for growth of all kinds, one which is beautiful in its plantings, but I feel as a viewer, that it requires us to listen, and observe, to see in a different way beyond what we already know. It is about accessibly on many levels, and about that idea over a period of time. I know of no other garden that’s ever attempted anything quite like it. I think the only other similar project, is that of the Confluence Project.

Heronswood now feels more and more to me like home. It’s a beautiful garden, and it acknowledges native plants to the region in a different way than other gardens. When I visit, I either feel like a child in the dream woods I imagined as a girl, or I am an adult in a European garden with exotics collected from around the world—with native plants creeping into it, embracing and cradling the place, bringing me back to where I come from too. I kind of get a thrill now feeling both ways while I’m there, and I can say with certainty, no other public garden I’ve seen yet, gives me that sense of place.

In this sense, it speaks to this region, more than just of the people. They feel one and the same, and this message is being grown into other parts of the garden too. I’ve watched as Heronswood has increasingly become more and more rooted and beautiful. I love this, and continue to feel much glee returning to it after seeing formal gardens and plantings online or in person.

I will break the different spaces down more fully during upcoming posts after my next visit. Each area deserves its own post, but for now, let’s return to the idea of the Renaissance Garden.

At the entrance to the garden there is a canoe, and to my mind, it symbolizes a journey or leaving. We can suspend our disbelief as viewers, and walk into the space in a different frame of mind. Then we cross water, we walk around water, we walk near the water, we feel water dripping on the water wall, and this too is part of the journey as we observe all of the plants—those that are there naturally, as well as those that have been added.

At the garden’s center is the much photographed and lush fern table. More than just a garden feature, it is symbolic of many things. Remnants of logging camps and pioneers are sprinkled throughout. Some may just think of it as junk, but it’s there to remind us all of what the land has gone through. And while the table has an incredible trellis design—showing the incursion of Europeans—it also can be seen to symbolize working together, building a bridge, bridging a gap, building something.

Stand beside the table under the forest canopy—even if it is only second or third growth. Come to the table with others. Around you are many incredible native plants, mixed in with other exotics from other places. Feast your eyes.

This garden has humans at its heart, but none of this is likely, or even possible, without our being drawn to plants, a drive that has many of us spending a lot of money to travel just to feast our eyes on designs or even the natural beauty of a place, and to share that experience of being there with others simultaneously. But this garden is different, it gives off the memory of the pain of that contact. It’s something we can all empathize with, in a language of plants that we all speak, and we can share in the happiness of this new growth, and rebirth. That’s what plants do.

This rebirth, or renaissance garden ties us all together. We’re part of the cycle too, not apart from it.

Maybe based a bit in my own story, one I know I share with many others of European descent who’ve lived in this region for generations, I very much connect with its design, and the name “Renaissance” too. This is a rebirth for the tribe, for the land, and for many of us as outsiders who’re descended from those who colonized the land and we still live here and love it too. (For the record, I come from a family of loggers on my mother’s side.) The name is a wonderful choice, and I hope that it’s the beginning of the conversation my classmate and I talked about, like the conversations he and I shared from our different perspectives. What do we want to have happen now?

Or, maybe it’s the rebirth of what a botanical garden can be? Maybe one with its center being a table in the woods with the carpet of verdant treasures from all people—with plants at the center. Maybe the center is everywhere, and the collectors are many and unnamed.

I thought long and hard about the Renaissance Gardens of Italy, and read more about the basics online. (For the basic Wikipedia article click here.) Which connections between these ideas and this space do you see? What can we take from the past to build anew? How does humanism connect these two places and eras?

I know there is a lot for us to think about and when I visit now, I linger there and take notes in my journal. How many other angles can we add to this conversation? How many other peoples? A botanical garden can be filled with plants from all over the world. How can we change how we see and tell stories about that process of display?

And lastly, when you walk through the garden, pay close attention to what you hear. I’ve visited this space many times now, and have had so many feelings. I’ve listened to conversations between others, and what I’ve heard the most often is, “I’ve had this. I’ve killed this. I want this.” Imagine the irony. I reflect on that now each time I hear it, and have made a commitment to speak about plants in a different way in a garden—that is if I speak at all. This is something C talked to us a lot about in school.

We also don’t have to walk through gardens and outcompete one another naming plants. I hear that a lot, in addition to people being corrected about their pronunciations. I’m not fond of this.

Think now too about the commodification of plants and what you seek out when you enter the garden. I professionally provide plants, and have thought long and hard about this. I think the combination of the legacy of a plant hunter/explorer/horticulturist and the rebirth of this garden, in and on the garden Dan built, can teach us a lot about our relationships with plants.

So, in what way reader do you too, depend upon and connect with plants? What do you want from a public botanical garden moving forward?

These are just some of the questions I’m left with when I leave Heronswood, and I’m grateful. Thank you to all of the people who’re growing this new experience for us.

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