danger garden

Friday, March 28, 2025

We Fling at Heronswood

It was great fun to visit Hersonswood Garden last July with my fellow Flingers (the same day we also visited Windcliff, Dan Hinkley's current garden). I think there were roughly 90 of us, but the garden is so large (15 acres) we quickly dispersed and only occasionally would we cross paths. Since I'd been a few times before, I was able to stroll at a leisurely pace and not try to see it all, I felt sorry for those folks who had to rush. Here are my highlights...

I started in the Rock Garden...

So cute, so fuzzy, so dangerous...

Pellaea gastonyi

Polystichum imbricans

Heading over to the Renaissance Garden (ferns!) you pass by some stately agaves...

The perfect wall for drainage and heat.

Lovely purples with the cotinus and acanthus.

This is the first time I've seen the Raining Wall (at the entrance to the Renaissance Garden) complete.

The fern table...

Tiny treasures planted in the table include...Dryopteris affinis 'Crispa Gracilis'

Blechnum penna-marina

Rhododendron valentinioides

Selaginella tamariscina 'Golden Sprite'

Calling out a few ferns planted in the garden; Polystichum polyblepharum.

Adiantum x mairisii

Adiantum aleuticum 'Subpumilum' (on either side of the moss).

Blechnum microphyllum

This was interesting to see. When at the Rhododendron Species Botanical Garden in February I spied a plant that looks a lot like this. I called that one out as perhaps Polygonatum mengtzense. But I had a phone screen shot in my files noting this plant as Maianthemum oleraceum. The plot thickens!

I've taken a photo of this container on several visits. Parts change, parts stay the same.

Okay, here's a confession. I love this...

I hate this...

I've felt the extreme love/hate ever since my first visit to the garden. One seems like an interesting way to raise up planters above the ground level, the other seems overly contrived and out of place.

Moving on...

I suppose you could call this artful hedge contrived, but it's plant based, not artificial.

Ditto for the potager.

I used to dislike the chanterelle fountain, but it's grown on me.

Imagine rinsing your vegetable harvest here after picking them from the potager...

Lillies, the flower of July...

I loved the dusty hues of this vignette.

Globularia incanescens

Empty pot as framing device, it works. It really does.

A little further into the same planting.

The tree ferns! These have been here for years, surviving the seasons, unlike some newer tree ferns in the Renaissance Garden.

Dryopteris crassirhizoma

I feel extreme plant lust every time I look at a photo of this fern.

A last look at the tree ferns (Dicksonia antarctica).

Making my way out of the garden and back to our bus I passed this totem pole that had been left to rest, decay, and return to the land.

It was a great reminder that the garden is now owned by the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe and going forward the garden will meld their vision with that of it's famous founder, Dan Hinkley.

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Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Windcliff, visiting during the Garden Fling

What better to do on a rainy spring day than edit down the 100+ photos I took at Dan Hinkley's home, Windcliff, last summer? It's pretty ideal to have a stash of photos to dip into whenever the mood hits. This visit to Windcliff was on Sunday, July 21st, the last official day of the 2024 Garden Fling, it was wonderful.

Our arrival was a little chaotic as we tried to decide if we were supposed to be walking around the garden, waiting for Dan, maybe touring the Brindley Garden garden next door first?

But then Dan came out to talk to the group and all was well.

The dogs were very entertaining.

What a handsome schefflera. love those deeply cut leaves.

Oh look at that...

I want to call it a fern table, but there are more "other plants" than there are ferns.

Some Marcia Donahue ceramic fungus does class the whole thing up.

The last time (the only other time) I'd been to Windcliff Dan wasn't inviting people into his greenhouse or plant propagation area. However, since that area was open for us to wander through that's where I headed first.

Just a sweet little dish full of moss and maybe an impatiens?

Sarracenia for days...

So many plants, what to look at!?

Curculigo sp., I was tempted, I had one in the garden for a few years that I'd purchased at Far Reaches Farm.

I loved this dark-leaved Saxifraga, but it wasn't available for purchase (yet). In the end I selected a couple Pseudopanax crassifolius and a native ginger, Asarum hartwegii HSIS 20045 (photos in this post).

Then I was off to see the garden! Daphniphyllum...

And the variegated version...

Up against the house was a fern bench, with pyrrosia planters lounging underneath.

Turning towards the Sound (Puget Sound that is). Like many of us in the PNW Dan experienced extreme plant death after the storm of January 2024, he opted to kill off what remained and start new, hence the plastic sheeting down on the ground to the right side of this photo.

Dustin Gimbel's totem sculptures looked quite at home in the garden.

Melianthus major

Salvia argentea

A few shots of Flingers, the garden and the house.

And like a magnet the Sound draws all eyes back towards it...

Dierama pulcherrimum

It was a clear day, so we could see Seattle off in the distance.

Layers and layers of plants.

Trachycarpus (the palms) and Yucca rostrata.

Lots of sarracenia...

Oh how I'd love a rill running between my arctostaphylos and sarracenia.

Containers up on the patio area off the back of the house.

~~Agave~~ Aloe (my bad, thanks @Cistus for the catch) and ferns in the same planting!

Working my way back around to the front of the house now.

But stopping to admire more of Marcia Donahue's work.

What a garden! On Friday we'll visit Heronswood, Dan's "other" garden.

Those of you who live within driving distance of Nehalem, Oregon (on the coast) might want to attend a talk Dan Hinkley is giving at the Performing Arts Center on April 25th, more info here.

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