A short walk in Seattle

We walked from Amazon to Gas Works Park along the shore of Lake Union to get in line early for dinner at Elemental, which is closing in a few weeks. Julie declared this walk to have no visual interest whatsoever. Or something like that. I will let my readers decide.

Sorry to lead with a crooked horizon line. Oh, horizon line, my old foe.



The horizon line is pretty bad in all these pictures. Amateurish!



Freshwater Lake Union has Lake Washington to its east and Puget Sound to its west, by way of the Ballard Locks.



In California, I think we'd call it "the Puget Sound".



The name of this little boat delighted me. Chemists and physicists perform ab initio calculations ("from first principles") to solve the Schrodinger equation in order to ascertain the physical properties of molecules. Cute!



Sleepless in Seattle, anyone?



We have some pretty awesome houseboats in Sausalito. We should go there together sometime.



Seattle emerges from a bleak winter into luxuriant spring and endless summer. On July 4, they have to wait until ~10pm for it to get dark enough for fireworks.





By climatic necessity, they do go a little overboard with the rhododendrons. Guy can no longer bear the sight of them. Me, I'm easy. I do think the best color for a rhodie is white or the palest possible pink. Maybe a pale, creamy yellow as a focal point. The fuchsia-pinks and reds are hard to take after awhile. The flowers are just too big and too numerous to bear those colors with dignity and grace for long periods of time. Maybe if they were also fragrant... Hey, Seattle. Plant some lilacs why don't you?





As you may know, Seattle has great wealth. Boeing moved headquarters to Chicago, but they still employ 10s of thousands of people here. Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, Costco, REI, Nintendo--companies that play a part in the daily lives of millions of people--are all based here. (REI--tens of thousands?)



Have I told you how Seattle is the west coast's most masculine city? I can annoy everyone carrying on about this. It can't be fey, hippie-dippy San Francisco with its pastel painted ladies. Trendy, image-obsessed Los Angeles? Definitely not a contender. San Jose and San Diego are both way too vague and nebulous... What are those places, anyway? Portland is Seattle's little sister and Seattle is all steel construction, jet engines, lumberjacks, hot coffee and craft beer. You sense it from the moment you drive in from the airport with the shipyards on your left and the big conifers everywhere.





That's the Aurora Bridge, carrying Hwy 99.



We're crossing the pedestrian-friendly Fremont Bridge.



Well, we're going to in a minute.



I was amazed how quietly it lifted. I'd expect there to be some creaking. Some engine noise. I mean, you know, there's tons of steel and concrete being pushed up into the air. But there was only silence.



We had to wait for the Queen of Seattle to pass.



Turns out the Queen of Seattle is a Californian transplant, from Sacramento!



Isn't she lovely?



I almost committed a faux-pas by attempting to cross before the bicyclists (who knows, it might be a moving violation), but I sensed something was wrong and stopped after just a couple steps. Whew!



On the other side we passed by the Adobe gardens,



No trespassing.



And got to our destination a few minutes later.



I should have taken some pictures in Gas Works Park, but I was ready to set down and cool my heels. Come back soon and we'll go to the library.

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.