5/22/12

Heronswood

The greenhouses are empty now.

Heronswood

I guess they've been empty for quite awhile.

Heronswood

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.

Heronswood

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.)

Heronswood

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

Heronswood

Heronswood

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.

Heronswood

Is that a hornbeam hedge?

Heronswood

I love the fabulous fenestration.

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How incredibly groovy is that??

Heronswood

J'adore! Want!

Heronswood

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

Heronswood

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.

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I wish I could tell you more about the plants.

Heronswood

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

Heronswood

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

Heronswood

Heronswood

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.

Heronswood

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.

Heronswood

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

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

Heronswood

That means the blog post is ending soon.

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Heronswood

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

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6 comments:

Kaveh Maguire said...

Congratulations on your exams and upcoming graduation.

I went to Heronswood in 2003 while I was in school but I had been subscribing to their wonderful catalogs and ordering plants from them for some time. It seems a little crazy now paying something like 10-20 bucks for a little tiny two inch pot that really needed to be grown on before you could plant it in your garden but they were the only way you could get some really rare wonderful things.

It is nice to see that the garden is being maintained to some degree. I hope a gardener buys it.

danger garden said...

I feel like such an idiot to have spent all my life within a few hundred miles of Heronswood but never visited, or received the catalog. Thanks for the tour.

Bonnie Story said...

Oooohhhhhhhhhh. Wow what lovely pics. I'm so glad to see them. Gawd, who will buy it???!! I'm scared!! Hope the day was really lovely!!

PS:Danger garden - Me too. I'm 45 minutes away.

Anonymous said...

Such an amazing garden, and I hope that someone will buy it for all the right reasons, and it continues in it's splendour.

It's at times like this that I was a rich philanthropist, and could invest in Heronswood myself. That will have to remain a daydream though.

rainymountain said...

Thanks for pictures of that mythical garden. I am glad that your studies are nearly over and hopefully successful too.

Unknown said...

The pictures are gorgeous! I'm glad you enjoyed your trip to Heronswood.

Heronswood does now have a new owner: The Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe. The Tribe's acquisition now bring Heronswood back into local hands.

Here's more info via the Seattle Times: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/text/2018484918.html