Heronswood

The greenhouses are empty now.



I guess they've been empty for quite awhile.



Heronswood goes on the block next month. The opening bid is three-quarter mill. You have a few weeks to think about it. Here is all the information you need.



Alas, we only came for Open Days. The Heronswood saga was before my time. Or, at the very beginning of my time. I read about it on Garden Rant. You will find no mention of the controversial closing on the Heronswood wiki, except for this link to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I'm going to leave it at that. Why open old wounds--wounds that were not even my own.

Our visit begins in the potager (because the sign in the lower left corner of the picture below offers a point of continuity to the picture above. In real life, you begin your visit with a walk through the woodland botanical garden. We'll go there later.)



I don't know who maintains the property now, but the potager was clean and someone bothered to sow neat rows of lettuce seeds.





Having not spent any time with the Heronswood catalog, and being generally unfamiliar with garden design's grander traditions, and knowing almost nothing about non-Sunset Zone 17 gardening, I won't be able to tell you anything about the plants here today.



Is that a hornbeam hedge?



I love the fabulous fenestration.



How incredibly groovy is that??



J'adore! Want!



Was Heronswood responsible for getting columnar barberries into our gardens? Was that them?



I have it in my head that they put blue geraniums there too. Is that right? Anyone know? I would like to know these things. I am almost done with school, btw. I took the two four-hour qualifying exams last week, and they went well. (Hence this little vacay in Seattle.) I find out Friday if I passed, but I feel pretty good about it. I have another month of school, but graduation feels like a fait accompli now. Yay, me.

Now I just have to find a job. Hopefully it will leave a little bit of room for a life and I can immerse myself in gardens again.























I wish I could tell you more about the plants.



This one Davidia involucrata. You can find a few of these in San Francisco.



You can call it the Handkerchief Tree, but why would you pass up the opportunity to say 'involucrata'?





And I'm 99% certain these two are grand supremo garden designers Charles Price (left) and Glenn Withey, authors of the famous perennial border at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens, which I have not yet seen in all my visits to Seattle. They also did the wonderful house a half-block away from my sister-in-law which of course I see whenever I visit the Queen Anne neighborhood.



And the fountain is by other grand supremos, Little and Lewis, whose work you can see more of with my friend Julie back in 2007.



I love the plants growing on the fountain canopy so much I will show you a blurry picture of them.


















Another one I know, climbing hydrangea (Hydrangea petiolaris), near the front of the woodland garden where our tour began IRL.



That means the blog post is ending soon.







Let me know if you end up winning the auction. I'd love to come back some day.