Far Reaches Farm

I know I've been delinquent on the blog but it is spring and are we ever busy!  The dire economic news has translated to very busy springs for everyone in the nursery business.  Stay home and garden, feather the nest.  We are thrilled as our sales are up quite a bit from last year and we continue to get new folks in from far away despite the Hood Canal Bridge being closed.  Last weekend we had folks from Federal Way, Vancouver, Olympia, Seattle and Bellingham come to the nursery despite our comparative enforced isolation.  Where there is a rare plant, there is a way, I guess.  We really thought May would be a time of perhaps a more leisurely pace and we could get the new shade garden finished and get cracking on the new bog garden.  We've made good progress on the shade garden but it has been with stolen moments.  One of the exciting things that happened last week was our friend and sculptor David Eisenhour installed 5 of his pieces in our shade gardens.  These are stainless steel and bronze magnified representations of seeds which David has examined under magnification.  They are a great addition and melding to the elements in the garden and we are thrilled to be able to offer his pieces in an outdoor garden gallery setting.  And the shade garden is looking so good right now - so much repressed anxiety being cast aside after this dire winter and the sheer joy at finding that you are still alive is translating into some fairly frightening growth and great flowers.  We are definitely going to have the shade garden done next month and maybe a good start on the bog garden as well.  Don't you just love listening to Obama speak?  Brings the pleasure of the English language back to the political scene.  I don't miss the incomplete sentences and truncated or made-up words of the past 8 years at all.

Another reason I haven't been writing is that one of my horticultural keystones has passed away.  I had no idea how important Steve Doonan of Grand Ridge Nursery fame was to me until I realized he was dying from cancer.  Steve was my longest running plant influence who inspired me to wide-eyed amazement way back in high school when he would lecture at rock garden study weekends with his cousin Phil and Phil's wife Kitty.  Now there are plant people!  Steve was bursting with life and enthusiasm and could instill an unhealthy lust in a person for the most obscure plant just through his love and mastery of growing that impossible alpine.  He always seemed immortal and there was no hurry to glean those nuggets of hard-won knowledge from him as he was always going to be there.  I am so diminished by his absence.  The plants that seemed to dance when he was around now are wearily plodding.  I expect that will change but god how I miss him.  I have his last phone message on our office phone machine and it always causes in me a surge of acute surprised hope tempered quickly by reality.  They broke the mold with that boy. that's for sure.