Wild is the Windcliff

The Pacific West Coast is where I first found my voice.

It was decades ago that my 19-year old bohemian self flew out alone from Toronto on a one-way ticket to California, armed only with guitar, duffel bag, and a hardcover edition of James Joyce’s Ulysees.

As a kid right through my teens, I suffered from a severe stutter, which made every human interaction a mental struggle. S-s-ss-s-st-t-t-a-aa-m-mm-mering whenever I tried to speak.

I learned to write poetry, play guitar, and draw instead.

That blue September day I touched down in San Francisco, it was like landing in a golden dream utopia.

And right from the moment of arrival, the strangest thing happened.

My stutter disappeared. I’m not entirely sure why, but it felt like a radical burst of freedom to be on my own and out in the world for the very first time.

This simple revelation kickstarted a Californian odyssey that not only changed my voice, it changed my life.

Rewilding the West

Nowadays, the one-time stutterer is now a writer and public speaker.

I returned to the West Coast recently to talk about new directions in naturalistic planting design at the invitation of the Bellevue Botanical Garden in Seattle.

The invitation came with an irresistible carrot.

While here, how would I like a day to tour around the coast and visit some local wonders like Windcliff, the private garden of Dan Hinkley? And drop by Heronswood, his former nursery as well?

Let’s stop right there.

Amongst plant phreaks and geeks, Daniel J. Hinkley is perhaps the quintessential American plant explorer, botanist, and author.

For decades now, he’s set out on seasonal expeditions to the remote rain forests and jungles of the planet in search of rare and unusual botanical plant species to bring back to civilization.

Yes, I’d love to visit his garden.

Talking the talk

Come mid-October, I flew across the country to Seattle to speak the next evening at the botanical gardens.

It turned out to be an inspired venue with a throng of local gardenistas showing up to hear my take on New Perennial planting design and the movement that goes along with it.

The following morning, it was carrot time as we set out across Puget Sound by ferry to the Kitsap Peninsula en route to Windcliff, Heronswood and the Bloedel Forest Reserve.

I was in fine horticultural company led by my vivacious host and driver Nita-Jo Rountree, highly creative gardener Denise Lane, and live wire Ciscoe Morris, a crazy popular garden TV personality in hometown Seattle.

The Pacific Northwest is largely unknown territory for me. Fortunately, my companions not only knew most of the plantlife, they knew the inside stories on the gardens we’d see that day.

Sound garden

We drove out along twisting roads shadowed by colossal stands of douglas fir and hemlock, rising out of a lush understory of sword ferns, huckleberry, salal and moss.

After passing through the postage stamp village of Indianola and more winding forest roads, we arrived at Windcliff – parking outside the steel gate at the top of the long driveway. We were waved in by Robert Jones, Hinkley’s partner who is also the architect that re-designed their low-slung cliff-top house. Dan himself was away on expedition in India.

It was now my turn to slip into plant explorer mode to take in the sights and sounds of what for me is a completely different kind of garden – in terms of habitat, zone, plant palette, pretty much everything.

The weather gods were kind, serving up a windless blue day with high puff clouds to diffuse the morning light.

Years on from my first trip to the West Coast, I was hardly expecting another revelation but Windcliff proved me wrong.

Right from the opening walk down the driveway, we were met by a wildly inspired convergence of plant geographies with specimens in all shapes and sizes. It was South Africa meets New Zealand and Australia with a toe in the American Southwest – all set against the tall cathedral spires of the Pacific Northwest forest.

I pinched myself to realize I was in that rarest of gardens – a two-acre master collector’s garden where botanical nerdistry and sophisticated planting design walked hand in hand, with nary a plant label in sight.

This happens almost never. Time to look deeper.

First off, we came to a pristinely organized greenhouse where the explorer turns back into a nurseryman to propagate his discoveries. Presumably, he tests his selections out in the garden while reserving the finest picks for his Hinkley collection at Monrovia.

Next door, we found an intensely planted vegetable garden with low brick walls overseen by shadow puppets from his far-flung travels. That was something of a theme as everywhere in the garden, it was plants and art all intertwined.

It seems that visitors in season are unlikely to leave empty-handed. I drooled at the gate to the boutique on-site nursery called Windcliff Plants where connoisseurial selections are available on open days to the garden.

Off the cliff

On this particular day, we were the only visitors – by far my preferred mode to really see a garden.

The north side of the house sheltered more intimate plantings of shady woodlanders with a sprawling Acanthus mollis sited at the front door, noted for its Italianate architectural foliage.

I’d just planted one at home in a similar spot, although I doubt it will ever grow quite this lush.

Moving around the far side of the house, we ducked through a long tunnel of bamboo to emerge in the sun-soaked cliff-side garden commanding epic views across Puget Sound to the mountains beyond.

On this morning, the frosted crowns of Mt. Rainier and Mt. Hood were hidden by mist. I was more than content to find myself now surrounded by a kind of open savanna studded with tall palms, yuccas, phormiums, and feathery pampas grass with madrona trees arching in the distance.

From our vantage point in the garden below, only the brim of the roofline was visible with the house carefully sited to capture the entire panorama.

Interestingly, there didn’t seem to be an obvious path through the garden – more like a series of gaps and openings designed to lead you on to the next part.

As a first-time visitor, I welcomed the challenge of finding my own way around.

Fire and water

Further along, I came to a stone fire pit that forms a natural gathering point in the main garden. Aligned along the four cardinal directions of the compass, the fire pit was built by Portland-based mosaic artist Jeffrey Bale and encrusted with all kinds of found stones, pebbles, and objects gathered on the beach below.

Up towards the house, a dual-level pool brings the element of water into the dry garden with boulders and cacti hovering at the edge.

Sacred spaces

The voice of a ghostly diva seemed to float in from some astral plane – or was it coming from the neighbour’s stereo next door?

Either way, it fit the moment. And I looked up to see a shrine-like grouping of tall wooden poles fixed with upright prayer flags gently rippling in the wind.

Without knowing what they were, a shiver of emotion washed over me in what felt like the numinous epicentre of the garden.

I was later told that each Himalayan prayer flag honoured a special garden friend or mentor who had passed away. Prayers of compassion are set into motion by the signature wind.

Hyperreality

The West Coast was casting its magic yet again, propelling me to a fresh epiphany.

The New Perennial approach is about abstracting from wild nature with aesthetics and ecology aligned.

Windcliff comes at it differently. Not so much naturalistic as hyperrealistic: A possible world generating the fiction of its own reality in extraordinarily creative ways.

The plant palette was refreshingly different from anything I’d seen to date. Mind you, I’ve not yet traveled to the antipodean parts of the globe.

The plantings themselves seemed overwhelmingly structural with massive and mature specimens threaded together like living sculpture. There was a strong accent on form, texture, and foliage.

There was not so much in the way of the layering, matrices and intermingling of a more naturalistic plant community.

Instead, the structural elements were supported by  great skeletal drifts of accent plants like Eucomis (Pineapple Lily), Agapanthus, and Dierama.

No doubt, it all looks very different in high bloom but I’m partial to the afterglow.

I suspect this garden dies well.

In terms of ecological approach though, Windcliff and Hummelo appear to be on the same page – choosing the right plants to fit their respective habitats and conditions at hand.

In the case of Windcliff, that means dry, arid soil on a site in an Olympic rain shadow with minimal rainfall, summer drought, and intense seasonal winds. In many ways, it’s almost Mediterranean in terms of climate.

Apparently before Hinkley started in on his garden in around 2004, the property was basically one giant lawn. He killed off the turf with vinegar, planted with no tilling, and watered only in the first season to establish the plants. Everything has been heavily wood-chipped to suppress the weeds.

Tough love indeed and clearly, the combination is working.

Anyway, I love how this kind of West Coast garden can open the mind to new possibilities. Here at Windcliff, I set out on an adventure and the world had come to me.

Final flashback

Reflecting back to my initial trip to the West Coast, my euphoric non-stuttering self was attracted by the siren call of Santa Cruz in Northern California on Monterey Bay.

At that time, the town was a free-flowing hang-out spot for new age fringe groups like the rainbow people, the Rajneesh cult, post-hippie dreamers, and exiles of every kind.

On a bus ride to the Monterey Jazz Festival, I befriended two Vietnam vets who got me a job working the front row of the festival as an usher. I got to pay homage to patron saint Jimi Hendrix while falling in love with the Californian woman of my dreams.

This unleashed a torrent of pure epiphanies, where I came to better understand something of my place in the world. The poetry seemed to write itself, the guitar played me, and California cast its spell.

I survived for the next seven months with the help of good friends and a blind trust in synchronicity. A plan to get a work permit proved impossible and I increasingly saw the value of continuing my education back home.

On my path homewards from California to Vancouver and then finally to Toronto, I experienced three  springtimes in a row.

That summer before returning to university in Montreal, I worked as a landscaper in Toronto with an offbeat outfit called Acme Environmentals.

I didn’t know it then but those early days digging in plants and shovelling gravel set the stage for later life, when I took up my pen and trowel to start this blog and help spark a different idea of what a garden can be.

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Coda: If you want to learn more about Windcliff direct from the source, I highly recommend Dan Hinkley’s Talk at the NYBG.