Windcliff

Finding a New Garden

I moved to a youthful land, relatively speaking. And rocky. And annoyingly dry, especially for someone who cut his teeth on a Pacific Northwest portrayed in Sleepless in Seattle, otherwise known as the movie in which it never stops raining.

Lay the Land

IT IS HARD TO IMAGINE the audacity of George Vancouver, who in 1792 sailed into the Salish Sea and began claiming and renaming every mountain and water passage for George III and a syndicate of associates. When the Discovery dropped anchor in what is now Blakely Harbor on the eastern shore of Bainbridge Island, it would have been təˡqʷuʔbe, “mother of waters.” Tahoma, looming 14,411 feet above the landscape, commanding the very essence of our region, he called Mount Rainier—a name that, sadly, became official a century later. On certain days, under the right conditions and from particular vantages, the peak appears preposterously huge.

But already here was a rich, colorful, and calibrated culture. They were not people in need of nomenclature for the places where their ancestors fished, hunted, gathered berries, and wove exquisite baskets from the bark of cedar.

The Suquamish on the eastern shores of our peninsula, the S’Klallam to the northwest, and the Skokomish to the south shared their daughters in marriage with one another while creating a healthy harmony in the tradition. Those three communities, though vastly changed, are still intact and vibrant today. Located in Indianola, Windcliff sits within the boundaries of the Port Madison Indian Reservation, authorized for the Suquamish in the Treaty of Point Elliot in 1855. It was a military leader of the Suquamish whose name, Kitsap, was eventually adhered to our county. From the same community, Chief Si’ahl is commemorated in the name of the largest city in our state, Seattle, whose skyline we see in the distance from our garden.

Windcliff lies on the northeast side of the Kitsap Peninsula, an impressive, narrow, and derelict pile of rocky debris left behind by retreating glaciers seventeen thousand years ago, only microseconds in a cosmic sense.

Geologists will tell you that residents of this northern end of our county were gifted through this dumping of glacial rubbish with a nonmarketable commodity known as the Vashon Stade, a natural soil formation that is one part loam, three parts sand, and ten parts boulders the size of children’s heads. The pH runs neutral to slightly acidic. There is, as you might guess, virtually no water-holding capacity. In fact, as composting of human bodies in lieu of conventional burial has become the new rage in Washington State, my last endeavor as a plantsman may be making the rocky, well-draining topsoil of my garden richer and more nutrient laden.

On the eastern side of this peninsula, the ice-chiseled Puget Sound (also known as the Salish Sea, as it was and is called by our native tribes) plunges to nearly a thousand feet deep. Its waters, with an invigorating average year-round temperature of 49 degrees F, temper the rise and plunge of mercury in our thermometer throughout the calendar. At any time of year, the water feels only slightly warmer than liquid nitrogen, as I know from the few times I have bathed in liquid nitrogen. I blame this frigid bathtub of ice water adjacent to our bluff for my inability to ripen tomatoes. This is a reasonable excuse.

The long stretch of snow-covered peaks farther to the east is the Cascade Range, comprising thousands of extinct and weathered volcanoes extending from British Columbia to northern California. These mountains, too, are relative youngsters, beginning their rise to glory only forty million years ago.

A window seat on any commercial aircraft arriving at or departing from SeaTac allows a full frontal of the peloton of active players in this range, the fire mountains, the gods of the Cascades. Each has an average lifetime of only a million years. Mount Baker, Glacier Peak, Mount Adams, Mount Saint Helens, and Mount Rainier lift their glaciers nearly two miles up into the sky, at least until they blow their peaks a bit higher in a plume of pyroclasts.

The lift of saturated Pacific storms into and above the peaks of the Cascades produces astronomically impressive levels of precipitation found nowhere else on earth. Mount Baker and Mount Tahoma (aka Rainier) regularly trade positions as the world record holder for annual snowfall; Mount Baker currently wears the “white shirt,” accepting ninety-five feet of snow during the 1998–99 winter. Yes, feet.

Now take a gander to the right from our south-facing bluff. The opulent Olympic Mountains are the centerpiece of our western skyline. They are segregated from the Kitsap Peninsula by Hood Canal, an ice-carved, narrow, and extremely deep fjord shared by nuclear submarines, harbor seals, and the orcas that eat them (the seals, that is). Nonvolcanic, they are younger than the Cascades by thirty million years and embraced entirely by Olympic National Park, the largest of its kind in the lower forty-eight. And it is this landform, the Olympics, that is the senior conductor of the climatic symphony that informs the way I garden.

This is not to say that the Cascades don’t have some say in the matter. Two breaks in that great Hadrian’s Wall of basalt allow seepage of supercooled arctic air into our beloved mild western maritime lowlands. I have a particularly low regard for the northernmost, the Frasier Valley in southern British Columbia, which is generally at fault when things go poorly for us in a bad winter. Canadians, eh? To the south, the Columbia River Gorge, east of Portland, is the curse of serious gardeners of interior Oregon.

But it is the Olympic Range that has the greater effect. Its series of peaks, rising to less than eight thousand feet, are our rain catchers and cloud movers. Storms from the Pacific, dehumidified as air rises and cools, are split in two; varying portions take the southern route, while the remaining head north. Where they meet again, too infrequently right over our property, updrafts and convection lead to a narrow band of significantly increased precipitation, known in Puget Sound-ese as the convergence zone.

Because of this folly, we drag our hoses on a slice of land that exists on the eastern edge of the so-called Olympic rain shadow. Travel due west from where we live for two and a half hours to Forks, Washington, slightly inland from the ocean and home to popular fictionalized bloodthirsty vampires, and you will find a yearly rainfall averaging twelve feet. Yes, feet. About forty miles northwest of Windcliff, the small town of Sequim averages a paltry sixteen inches of rain annually. By the time the storms converge closer to home, our yearly totals are boosted to a slightly more generous thirty inches per year.

By closer to home, I refer to Indianola, a charming village hugging the shores of the sound accessed by a dead-end road. The village center consists of a general store, post office, and covered pavilion. Indianola is filled with people who love their dogs, with perhaps one or two people who loathe the fact that so many people love their dogs.

It was upon this already rich fabric that the garden of Windcliff was begun. But not by us.

Early Years

MY GARDENING LIFE BEGAN IN MICHIGAN. It has been said that you can’t go home again, yet the rule, it seems, does not apply to those with a profound curiosity about the natural world. Fortified with additional data points, those enamored of the fullness of life will rediscover the landscapes of their youth with new eyes on each return to their beginnings. Though seminal moments of my life as a gardener occurred in the woodlots of northern Michigan with sweeps of trillium and lady’s slippers, and in autumn fields of asters and goldenrods, going home has only buttressed my knowledge of and appreciation for my youthful surroundings.

I taught high school horticulture in Fremont, Michigan, in the late seventies. After spending summers visiting siblings in Washington, all of whom were part of the great Lutheran western migration, I made the decision to relocate, along with my endearing dog, Emerson, to the Evergreen State. I chose, however, the infrequently green Wenatchee Valley in the high desert east of the Cascades to begin my association with our region. Wenatchee was then, and remains, a dream for those who live to ski, raft, hike, and bicycle or hunt morels.

During this time, I explored the western slope of the Cascades on weekends, equating the two-hour drive over the Cascades in a botanical sense with the drive from Michigan to Florida. Seattle, the ever-opulent Emerald City, ultimately stole my heart and I was accepted into a nascent master’s program at the University of Washington in the autumn of 1983. Emerson and I moved that September into the iconic Stone Cottage in Washington Park Arboretum.

In early October of the same year, I had my first date with a man I had met in a gay square dance group called the Puddletown Squares. On a quintessential foggy autumn day, Robert Jones and I manned his two-station rowboat from West Seattle—where Robert lived—across Elliot Bay and along the harbor front of downtown Seattle, negotiating our small boat between ferries departing and arriving from Bainbridge and Bremerton as Emerson performed seal-watching duty from the helm. And somehow, in one of the greatest marvels of life, from that day of dipping oars into dead calm water and foghorns and a warming fire in his cottage after our first full day together, thirty-eight years have evanesced, like an unanticipated gust of wind suddenly carrying away thousands of gilded leaves at their finest moment.

I accepted a position at Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island the day I graduated in June 1985, and Robert and I moved into a small farmhouse that no longer exists on the estate. At that time, the Reserve and its two-hundred-plus acres were not open to the public but maintained for Prentice and Virginia Bloedel, who visited each year for the month of August. We supplied their kitchen with vegetables and eggs from our garden. During the rest of the calendar, the Reserve was our own, our refugia from an immense sadness at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Too many visited us in that storied landscape for the first and only time.

While my tenure at the Reserve was brief, it was bizarrely seminal, with prophetic moments that in retrospect seem to defy simple coincidence, although many would consider them distilled serendipity. One of my highly vaunted responsibilities as maintenance supervisor was to haul loads of trash weekly to the transfer station, also known as the dump, near Hansville, nearly twenty-five miles away. Each week, especially on crystalline days in winter, I would pause at the intersection of Hansville Road and NE 288th Street. From the top of the hill, 288th was a commandingly handsome tree-lined allée revealing in the distance the peaks of the Olympics. As I passed this road each week, I would say to myself quietly or perhaps simply mouth the chimera as in only a game, “That’s a road I would live on.” Two years later, on September 1, 1987, with Emerson in the back seat, Robert and I opened the gate to our new property and first home. We called it Heronswood on that evening; the home and garden remain at 7530 NE 288th Street today.

Also, just as weirdly, on daydreaming days at the Reserve I would look over the bluff from the front lawn of the main residence and imagine the properties I could see in the distance, cogitating on the vantages of Puget Sound and surrounding landscapes, and formulate pipedreams of gardening there. As I was a newbie to West Sound country, my geography was not well honed. I believed I was looking at the high bluffs of Whidbey Island, in truth many miles to the north. Today, if one were to draw a perpendicular line from the center of the residence as it sits on the Bloedel property, it would nearly precisely dissect the land that was even then called Windcliff.

Heronswood

THE BRAWN AND BRAINS OF WINDCLIFF, Heronswood is a story that requires its own telling. When Robert and I moved there, we brought our meager home furnishings in a single load in a rented U-Haul. The plants and propagules I had amassed over nearly a decade took another six trips in the same truck. As much as Robert may not have understood the dimensions of what I hoped to create, there could be no mistaking my intention. I had always wanted a nursery. We arrived at Heronswood with all the makings while primed to begin looking at plants in the wild.

At the time, I was teaching horticulture to adults—smart adults—at Edmonds Community College. No better student can be found than a teacher. Heronswood is where I sharpened my pencil as a gardener and a plantsman, in part by inquisitiveness but mostly out of necessity.

In the woodland, borders, and potager of that first garden, I learned the principles of placing plant next to plant. For the first five years, as my canine soulmate, Emerson, watched with some degree of concern, there was a frenetic intensity to our lives. Heronswood took flight by my being possessed by something indescribable—something between resolve, rapacity, insistent hunger, and adamant refusal to fail.

The development of the garden at Heronswood went hand in hand with the evolution of the nursery and of my grasp of the plant kingdom. But also, I was a student of gardening in 1990 Seattle, which was heavily weighted toward competitive plantsmanship and a clamant need for precisely pigmented combinations. I don’t mean to be disparaging. I bought into it hook, line, and sinker—the color-driven double mixed border and assorted contrivances, following the English straight down the garden path. Many parts of the garden at Heronswood, those most popular with visitors, were sternly controlled and managed. It was in the woodland, however, where I found my true soul in the process of garden making by evoking bits of nature. There is where I learned to own a garden, and I took with me to Windcliff the most valuable lessons acquired.

I evolved a gardener’s intuition but never the confidence of a designer. I could only decipher what had happened well, or poorly, after the fact—Monday morning quarterbacking. I never envisioned a road map—at Heronswood or at Windcliff—but instead gardened via exasperatingly long and contradictory conversations.

Heronswood became a laboratory, a hotel and salon, an entrepôt of ideas and new plants with an eclectic guest list of often-celebrated authors, artists, designers, gardeners, and media personalities. It was bigger than its parts, and more than Robert and I and our talented and adored Heronistas could sustain.

By 2000, girdled by staff and smothered in responsibilities, both Robert and I were feeling suffocated by success. Without our having even remotely considered a deliberate plan to extract ourselves from the business, an emancipator from the East Coast appeared like an apparition, with big promises and an even fatter paper bag filled with cash.

The psychopathology of the relationship we ultimately agreed to and endured for the next six years is inexhaustibly rich, but it serves no purpose to rehash or ridicule. It was as if we had picked up a deranged hitchhiker along the road simply because we were famished and he was holding a family-size bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, all the while knowing we would be held hostage at knifepoint long after the finger lickin’ was finished. We were as culpable in making poor decisions as the purchaser. As a Stephen Sondheim lyric from Sunday in the Park with George goes, “I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken. The choosing was not.”

On a beautiful spring day in May 2006, I rode my bike from Windcliff to work at Heronswood. An hour later, I rode back through the gates of Windcliff and did not return to Heronswood for six years.

Leaving Heronswood

YEARS AGO, a month after we received a six-week-old English springer spaniel, Robert and I unexpectedly adopted an orphaned four-month-old American cocker. As dogs are known to do, ours have proffered us years of undiluted pleasure along with immense veterinary bills. There is an entire wing of our local pet clinic named in their honor. Yet our only regret in bringing any of our dogs into the family is later having to navigate the loss of their companionship, the natural yet dreaded transition to that point beyond our touch, as each in turn jumps the fence and at last bounds freely away.

Leaving my first garden will ultimately seem to have been a much easier segue, despite my experience at the time of all those clichéd phases of death and dying. I must avoid sounding overly sentimental. We did make the decision to sell Heronswood without any gun held to our heads. But I expected the garden to continue and evolve, that I would have the opportunity to return in my dotage for an incontinent stagger, revisiting saplings that had become trees or a colony of ranunculus that had, at last, reached the proportions of my dreams. I was anticipating my role as the curmudgeon, saying a lot by saying nothing at all while scrutinizing the unavoidable changes that must happen to any garden.

For a while, I was afforded the luxury of two gardens at once—one with a respectable and wise patina of age, perhaps with just a bit of arthritic gimp, and one with the personality of a frisky, badly behaving springer spaniel. I would be able, at least I thought, to let go slowly of the first as I gained devotion to the second. In truth, I did not have a clue how to leave a garden at all. So then, after the sting had subsided, it seemed quite right that the gate was at that time so abruptly shut. I began to see that gardens have a way of following you home like an orphaned puppy dog.

Though an enchanting potting shed, a particularly ancient sugar maple, or a sublime water feature may be left behind in gardens we create, we never abandon the approaches and appreciations we garner along the way. Those are the tutorials that come with us, neatly packed and ready to use. And fortunately for Robert and me, all of our really big mistakes had been left behind.

Astonishingly enough, I would once again face these very mistakes on the same property six years later. In 2012 I accepted the position of director of Heronswood, now owned and operated by the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, who had purchased the property at auction. It was a rare gift, an opportunity to do it right this time and ultimately leave Heronswood with grace.

Windcliff

IN AUTUMN 1999, we had been fully permitted by Kitsap County to build on a high bank waterfront parcel on Hood Canal boasting a magnificent view of the Olympic Range. The property was on a busy road and possessed lifeless, tired soil. It would not be an unproblematic place to garden, nor a quiet place to live.

Two decades earlier on a cloudless June day, Robert and I had visited Peg West and Mary Stech, acquaintances we’d come to know through fundraisers we’d hosted at Heronswood. We had arrived at their property, Windcliff, to help them prune an old specimen of Acer palmatum ‘Dissectum’, the ubiquitous weeping red-leaf Japanese maple. Our visit had lacked even a hint of covetousness. Like standing before Half Dome or the Taj Mahal or the Venus de Milo, one might be filled with awe but never consider possessing such beauty.

For reasons I can’t fully recall, before we launched our building project on Hood Canal we wrote Peg and Mary, longtime residents of Indianola, to ask if they knew of any other available nearby properties. They called us the following day, saying we had “thrown them a lifeline.” We drove up a steep and snaking narrow lane posted at 12.5 mph and signed papers to purchase their property twenty-four hours later. On that vivid June day, we stood on a turf-covered bluff with a view—the one of impossible dreams—and felt the mirth that comes from the promise of something new and good.

The commencement of a new garden is an exercise in controlled elation—a galvanization of all the things you know you have done right thus far, tempered by the realization that there are a lot of things you are not yet aware of that you are probably going to do wrong. Much, I suppose, like having a second family, when youthful expectancies and anxieties are set aside and contentment is found simply in the process. Contentment, that is, until the arrival of the unanticipated.

Garden Inspiration

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I watched a movie called Enchanted April about a party of English ladies who rent a villa on the northern Italian coast for a month. Even though the house sits directly above the Mediterranean, the views of the water beyond are concealed by a mature, jumbled, and overgrown garden with half-broken pots of pelargoniums on the terrace and paths tumbled by fragrance (the smells are honestly projected onto the screen). Far from being an obtrusive landscape, it is portrayed as a place where spirits are rejuvenated while rediscovering love and hope. Mentally extracted frames from this film became my muse as I navigated the prospects laid out before us.

With the luxury of not having to immediately move onto the property, Robert and I acquainted ourselves with the site for nearly three years before fully committing to any tactic. Watching the sun arc through the sky through each season was pivotal in orienting the house and ultimately creating the garden. Though the previous owners were rambunctious gardeners and had established a refined palette of mature trees and shrubs directly surrounding the existing home, the lion’s share of the six-and-a-half-acre property was a sterile slate of turf mown directly to the bluff edge and the fenced boundary lines.

For nearly two decades I had gardened inch by inch. There were no vistas at Heronswood. We were completely concealed by forest, and what we reveled in was found mostly at our feet. Quite suddenly I was gardening mile by mile. Whereas I do not believe all gardens need to confine themselves within the context of place, we simply had no choice but to tackle head-on this expanse of sky, water, and looming volcano. I was acutely aware that I did not wish to create a garden with the primary charge of embellishing a beautiful view. I would need to have it disappeared to make what I was to create stand on its own.

I’ve learned that every garden space has an inimitable driver, if but a grove of birch in northern Michigan or an outcropping of rock in Arizona; there is an element unique to any property that leads you. In our case, it was our iconic Pacific madrona (Arbutus menziesii) that already graced our bluff edge. The hues of the bark of our madronas, resplendent in the light of early morning and late afternoon, inspired the exterior and interior design of our house.

Besides the unknown variables inherent in any potential garden site, there are a few elements of style that we all bring to the table. What type of garden do I want? The answer is generally found not so much in what the site demands as in how we approach our lives. Designing our garden on a grid was anathema to us. Though we live highly structured lives, we also live informally. I wanted an inviting, intimate garden, much like the overstuffed chair next to our fireplace, much like that place of self-discovery along the Mediterranean coast I had seen on the silver screen years before.