Heronswood Nursery restoration is underway

By  Daniel Jack Chasan, Crosscut.com

The blue poppies are gone, says Dan Hinkley, as he walks through the Heronswood garden he created and is now restoring near Kingston, on the Kitsap Peninsula, but he'll collect plants in the Himalayas this fall, and he'll bring back more seeds.

Walking down a narrow path through tall second- or third-growth conifers, wearing a fleece pullover on a chilly morning, Hinkley explains that he and his partner, Robert Jones, started the garden when they moved into a house on the property in the late summer of 1987. The trees were small, but they had to rip out the usual tangle of Himalayan blackberries. Then, they cleared paths through the woods, built stone walls, created beds, collected plants.

"I planted a hedge between us and the neighbors on the east side of our property on the weekend we moved in," Hinkley recalls. "We were tired and stressed out, thinking we were not going to be able to afford the property and had a domestic quarrel. Since then it became my mantra to never plant anything in your garden when you are not happy — the bad memories linger with the plant."

Up above, they created a nursery. At its height, Brinkley says, they employed 30 people. They sent out 50,000 yearly catalogs, which people prized not least for Hinkley's own well-written essays. (You wouldn't believe how much work that catalog took, Hinkley says.)

"Heronswood helped to both create and define the gardening explosion of the 1990s," Crosscut writer Valerie Easton wrote in Pacific NW. The garden was "heralded as the most impressive collection of exotic plants in the country," as Rachel Pritchett wrote two years ago in the Kitsap Sun.

In 2000, they sold the property and the business to the giant W. Atlee Burpee company. Hinkley and Jones stayed on at Heronswood, although in 2004 they left the house on the property and moved 12 miles away to Indianola. Then, in 2006, Burpee moved the nursery operation to Pennsylvania, fired the staff and largely closed the place down.

Allegedly, the company stripped the garden of many exotic plants. Unquestionably, it let the place run down. It looked for a buyer. It didn't find one. Maintenance became minimal. Garden people assumed Heronswood was history.

"I knew in my heart of hearts" what was going to happen, Hinkley says. He thought someone should just put the neglected garden out of its misery.

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