Seattle Archives | James Alexander-Sinclair

Part Three: Even though I know very little about indoor plants even I know that this is extraordinary.

Basically, Amazon which, along with Starbucks, Microsoft and Boeing, is based in Seattle and has taken over a couple of downtown blocks for their offices. Some of these are conventional buildings (albeit arranged so that there are lots of public areas and enough light – the buildings in the path of the sun are lower) but in the middle are the spheres. What a place to work – very different, I imagine, to the Amazon warehouse on the outskirts of Milton Keynes: the temperature and humidity is perfect for both plants and people. The diversity and health of the plants is amazing – they are all hand watered so the gardeners know each plant intimately. Pest are controlled by a weekly release of predators. It has the biggest, healthiest green wall I have ever seen. Scattered throughout are desks and meeting areas amongst the plants.

And they pay their gardeners properly.

Every office should be like this – although for the sake of clarity I must say that these spheres are for meetings and a bit of peace. I am sure that, back in the other blocks, there are cluttered desks, stationery stores, executive toys and discarded sweet wrappers.

I am using my desk as a model here except that mine also has a cheque for £25.00 from the Premium Bonds (Go me!) and a plaster cast of a human skull that I bought in Clapham thirty years ago. It is there to remind me of rapidly approaching mortality in an effort to make me concentrate harder on deadlines and seizing the day. It seldom works.

Back to the hotel for a seven minute turnaround before heading off for the next gig. At this point I realise that I have not eaten anything since breakfast at 7:00 this morning. This is possibly while I feel exhausted. Fortunately on arrival at the Northwestern Horticultural Society I am confronted with one of those peculiarly American buffets which contains everything you could ever imagine in slightly strange combinations – seldom has a sight been more welcome. I crank out another talk to another delightful audience and return to the hotel to pack and sleep.

My last morning in Seattle involves some brisk walking – a good idea if one is going to be stuck on an aeroplane for nine hours. I find breakfast in another diner – not my best breakfast but pleasantly sizeable.Hotel breakfasts are invariably both overpriced and disgusting so it is jolly to go out and find things. The fog has moved in and with it the bone tingling chill of February – time to go home.

I like America and Americans. Seattle is a very laid back city, its main drawback is the homeless population. In many shop doorways (and in encampments on the embankments of freeways and under motorway bridges) you will find sleeping huddles many of them slumped in an opiate coma: this is the visible manifestation of OxyContin – a seriously evil drug.

Hope I come back here soon

I am listening to Sir Greendown by Janelle Monae

Seattle (Part Two)

Monday
You find me writing this while eating marionberry ice cream. I have no idea at all what a Marionberry looks like but it is a pretty good way to end a busy day.

It began with two more gardens the Miller Garden and the Dunn garden. One of the things that rich Americans like to do, if they are of a horticultural bent, is to leave endowments in order that their gardens survive after they have shuffled off. Betty Miller was a hard drinking, chain smoking woman of formidable mien. By all accounts she was the sort of person you want on your side if fund raising for anything. She gardened enthusiastically and has left a good collection of plants around her house inside the gates of a private estate overlooking the Puget Sound. Her endowment supports four gardeners who keep the place looking good even though nobody lives in the house and few people visit. All arranged visits for 2020 are already booked up so the only way to get in is by taking a course or being a very lucky visitor from Britain. It must be odd, and lonely, for the gardeners sometimes to be gardening without clients or visitors.

From there to another endowed property, The Dunn Garden. It is a weaving garden- by which I mean that it fluidly sashays across the property – with some very handsome trees but needs a bit of a slap. Fortunately it has a young and energetic head gardener called Mark Mosinski who, hopefully, will do great things. Oddly the gardens weaves amongst three different properties – the original house and two newer ones.

Tuesday was judging day.

Dan Hinkley, David Culp and I are in charge this year. David is one of the most energetic and entertaining gardeners I have met: to hear him talk of his garden is to be in need of a lie down soon afterwards. He is constantly gardening and when not gardening is executing exquisite arrangements, hybridising hellebores, organising Galanthus Galas, cooking and fizzing around the country writing books, designing and talking.

Dan is simply a legend and one of the great regrets in my gardening life is not to have met him earlier. We have fun judging (shepherded by the formidably beautiful show organiser, Janet Endsley).

It is different to RHS Shows in many ways most notably that it is inside under quite unnatural lighting. The gardens are assembled in 90 hours and extra points are given for forcing plants and bulbs into unseasonal bloom. That said there are a couple of very impressive gardens and others with some great ideas.

After the judging thing I go off to be a tourist. Dale Chihuly – whose glasswork has been shown at the Tate and at Kew – is relatively local so there is both a museum and a garden dedicated to his work. It is brightly coloured and cheerful but also a little annoying. The garden is at the foot of Seattle’s most famous landmark, the Space Needle which was built in the summer of 1962 to celebrate the world fair. You go up it is a fast lift and wander about enjoying the vertigo.

Wednesday sighed first day of the show and I feel in need of a bracing breakfast. On David’s recommendation I seek out a restaurant called the Biscuit Bitch (tag line “From trailer park to table”) which serves biscuits and gravy. Do not, however, think that this is weird agglomeration of Bourbon and Bisto. This is a simply a scone topped with bechamel sauce, cheese, scrambled egg, bacon bits and grits. It is gargantuan, the breakfast equivalent of Tyson Fury and I am defeated in about the third round. Had I been dropped into a swimming pool I would have sunk without a bubble.

I stagger back to the convention centre and am there to open the proceedings with a talk to (apparently) about 900 people. All is fine except when I kick the projector wire while pirouetting to make a point and there are no pictures until Fred the AV man is found and order is restored.
It is one of things that those of us who do lots of talks dread but forces one to adapt and flounder elegantly in the hope that nobody really notices.

I do my gig, all seems fine and I hang on to listen to Dan who is, frankly, annoyingly adorable. very witty, very knowledgeable – he is balder than I though which is something I grasp with the enthusiasm of a man slipping down a precipice clinging on to a sapling. Bit of feedback to garden creators (not designers), an interview for Bellevue Botanic Gardens and I am done for the day.

Thursday breakfast is more restrained and European then I am back to listen again to Dan and David Culp with a quick dip into the rather glamorous garden of Renny Reynolds (formerly florist and party organiser to the wild world of Studio 54). I seldom get to listen to new speakers so this is all a bit of a treat even though it heightens one’s state of anxiety – especially when Renny showed a picture that was exactly the same as one of mine!

Talk two is at 1:00 and soon after David Culp and I wander off to visit the Amazon Spheres of which more in part three….

I am listening to to Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss better known from Kubrick’s 2001:A Space Odyssey

I fear we (or you anyway) are in for another multi part blog as I am off again, this time to Seattle.

Sunday: I have been here once before but only for a very fleeting visit: it was autumn 2012 and I was headed for Vancouver and had the idea that I would go to Seattle and take a bus from there so that I could admire and enjoy the bright colours of autumn or fall as they prefer to call it over here. (I understand why but I fear that it doesn’t fully capture the richness of autumn which is not just about falling leaves but about harvest and extra sweaters and the like). Anyway, long story short it rained so hard that I could see very little of interest from my bus window. There is a blog about it here if you wish to extend your research.

I am travelling on a very crowded flight and am in the middle of a row of four seats. While not unbearably uncomfortable it is not a luxurious position in which to find oneself. The main problem is how you get out to go and do a pee when your neighbour on the aisle is asleep. It seems a bit rude to wake them but climbing over a semi recumbent person is both a little too intimate and requires more gymnastic flexibility than I find myself capable of at my time of life. Nothing for it but to grit the teeth and brace the bladder until they awaken.

I am eating pizza in Pagliacci’s on Pike Street. it is 7:00pm but my body still thinks it is the middle of the night. The man at the next door table is relating the entire plot of Masters of the Universe a woman who is bravely feigning interest. He has an umbrella which acts as a sword for the “By the Power of Greyskull” moments.

Busy day as I am whisked off by the delightful Jason to catch a ferry. We are off to do the Seattle triple – the three outstanding gardens on Bainbridge Island. First up is the legendary Dan Hinkley’s garden, Windcliff. I am fully aware that February is not the sine qua non of garden visiting months but this is quite a place. A view to die for of the Puget Sound, the bone structure of a chiselled starlet (fabulous rock work and a stream that trickles and twinkles) and some truly gobsmacking plants. in particular a trio of Arctostaphylos subtly flowering and with burnished stems the colour of freshly poured Beaujolais.A Sophora nudging into flower, towering Drimys, scattered Opuntias and wherever we went the sweet scent of Edgeworthia.
All that and hummingbirds too.

Second is Heronswood. In a previous life this was the nursery founded by Dan and from whence all sorts of horticultural rarities were dispatched across the United States. Plants whose ancestors were discovered on explorations across the known and unknown world. The gardens consist of a more formal area around the house which dissipates into a lace of winding woodland paths. The gardens and stock were originally sold to the Burpee seed company who shipped all the plants to the east coast for propagating and pretty much ignored the garden until the financial crisis when it was sold to the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe who have brought the gardens back and continue to care for them
To be honest, it was too early in the season to get the full caboose. Lots of good Hellebores and Cyclamen but many of the plants were still asleep, the only evidence of their existence being an alluringly simple transparent plastic label protruding seductively from the earth

Number three garden (all this fortified only by a troika of pastries at breakfast time) was the 150 acre Bloedel Estate. This is less of a garden with trees than a nature reserve with a couple of gardens. We walked along well maintained paths through meadows and moss shrouded woodland. There are bridges and boardwalks, fallen trees and fields of ferns. It is really charming.
Finally we emerge by the original house that is modest and symmetrical with a view down a steep slope to the sea where you can here the incessant catcalls of a colony of seals. Near the house is a formal Japznese garden with raked gravel, artfully arranged boulders and a pretty impressive tea house large enough to hold not just a tea party but a bring and buy sale. A moss garden follows which, while interesting, is a bit shallow compared to the naturally occurring moss cavalcade available in the woodland.

We retire to eat Vietnamese buns in Bainbridge town before catching the ferry back. I am beginning to droop but nothing wakes you up faster than standing on the prow of a ferry while you cheeks lose all feeling in the icy Pacific winds.

I am listening to The Big Moon.