Winter storms can't crush Barfod's American dream

Originally published Saturday, February 15, 1997

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

"When people ask me if ferns might be the best low-maintenance solution, I tell them to maybe ask a psychiatrist, if they feel that everything in a garden must always be cut back and raked and kept so neat like a kitchen.

"If you can be happy to let the ferns do their own thing, and there is die-off and maybe some moss, like they have been doing for millions of years ... that is low-maintenance!"

--Torben Barfod

The soft ground gives way a little underfoot as you enter Barfod's Hardy Ferns nursery in the 23600 block of the Bothell-Everett Highway. Water gently gurgling off huge, mossy cedar trunks into twin fern-framed ponds lures you away from the sight and sound of traffic and into a Hobbit haven.

This was not always an idyllic setting. It wasn't much more than an old fruit orchard grown over with scrub brush and pocked with soggy sinkholes when they bought the property with an old house on it back in 1962.

After having worked for other landscape contractors and nurserymen since coming from his native Denmark in 1958, Torben bought into the American dream of starting his own business: a landscape business and wholesale/retail nursery. And as the nursery boss and one-man landscaping crew, he realized that dream.

"Anna has helped with customers, but she also raised our three children," said the gray-bearded Torben in a soft voice that could be blown away on a good wind. "I have done all this," he said.

And then, as his big outstretched fingers described an arc of collapsed greenhouses and extensive storm damage, he adds parenthetically:

"I was going through the greenhouses, checking on all the roofs because of the big storms after Christmas, when they all seemed to come down at once, with a big bang. Maybe I should have stayed inside them and gone down with the ship, like a captain."

Commercial nurseries and greenhouses took a beating in the one-two punch of winter storms that brought record snowfall and rain. Several of Barfod's greenhouses, constructed mostly of wood or tubular plastic frames covered with plastic sheeting, were destroyed.

"Many of the ferns were flattened, but they can come back," he said optimistically. And so will Barfod. At 73, even a fern slows a little. But Torben Barfod began picking up the pieces and starting all over again. When I visited him, he was splitting his time and energy between storm cleanup and preparation for the big Northwest Flower and Garden Show, where he has sold and lectured about ferns for almost a decade.

As spring brings even the flattest fern to life again, Barfod is rebuilding. Ironically, he had just invested a substantial amount of money into bringing his greenhouses up to Bothell's code when much of the work went down with them.

"We have had trouble with Bothell (code inspectors) ever since we were annexed several years ago," Barfod said. "I was against it (annexation), but what could one man say or do. I also could have just quit and sold out, but this is what I do!

"When you get older, you do with your head what you used to do mostly with your back. You use your skills, and you pick what you want to do at any time of the day. But you can still work all day, if you want."

Friends have suggested, for example, "that I could increase production if I got an automatic potting machine. And I say: 'Why?' I do potting by hand because it is relaxing. I turn on some music and I pot my ferns, and I can pot more plants by hand than I need, anyway."

Getting out, retiring and doing the rocking-chair number might not have been a difficult decision. Because he had no hired help, and because of the nursery's year-round maintenance requirements, the Barfods haven't had a vacation together in decades. "And the developers would like to have our land," said Anna Barfod, "but Torben said to me: 'Then, what would I do?'

"We have all this, that we made from nothing. And even this funny house that has been added onto so many times that it looks like it was for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ... we cannot go somewhere else and start all over again now.

"Torben has to have some land to scratch in. I want to keep him around for a long time yet. So we will stay here and he will rebuild."

At the back end of the greenhouse and work shed area, above the banks of two larger, creek-fed ponds teeming with ducks, geese and other wildlife, Torben stops awhile and notes:

"This small stand of trees, these are Japanese larch. I planted them from seed even before we moved onto the property, maybe in about 1960. And it shows that you can grow a fully mature tree in your lifetime.

"I don't know if larch wood is good for anything, but I planted them so we would have trees to hold a swing," he said, pointing to a wide wooden plank suspended by ropes from the lowest larch branches.

"And I still like to swing here. You should never get too old to swing."

(Note: Since the original publication of this column, the Barfods have moved away from Bothell.)

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.