Originally published Saturday, September 27, 1997

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Dan Hinkley's Heronswood Nursery is seeded with spontaneous little comments, such as follows the entry for a small $5 horsetail plant, or Equisetum scirpoides:

"Let's make a deal: I won't tell your dad you spent good money on a horsetail if you don't tell mine that I spend thousands of dollars a year on cow poop."

A transplanted Michigan farm boy turned urban(e) horticulturist, Hinkley has turned about 8 acres of rural Kingston wetland into a nursery and woodland garden that is one of Kitsap County's natural jewels. Hinkley and partner Robert Jones, who defected from a career as a Seattle architect, and a staff of anywhere from nine to 20, run one of the largest and certainly most beautiful and diverse horticultural businesses west of St. Louis and east of Japan.

"I've always dreamed of all this ... to have exactly what I have now, and I'm never going to leave here," said Hinkley, 44. His family's exquisitely decorated house is planted smack-dab in the middle of the wandering woodland garden, "although now it's more like the garden has moved into the house," he said as we absorbed strong black coffee and late-summer sun on a back deck that felt like a jungle clearing.

As you read this, Hinkley is already on his perennial gathering trip in Asia, where he scouts the swamps of Korea and Himalayan foothills of Nepal for seeds and cuttings that might eventually make it into the nursery or his unusual catalog.

Heronswood offers some 2,600 varieties of plants that Hinkley and Jones think can survive and offer something special to Pacific Northwest gardens and landscapes.

Heavy mail-order business forces them to close the nursery from February through mid-May. For visits by the public, the gardens are open, free of charge, five days each year. At other times, groups of six or more can schedule visits at a cost of $75 an hour. Most of those fees go to wildlife and natural habitat programs.

The mail-order business is heaviest in the spring and fall (two huge United Parcel Service trucks daily).

"We lucked out when they settled the UPS strike; we're about to go into our big fall-order season," Hinkley said.

This also is the season, just before his Asian gathering trips, when Hinkley must chain himself to his word processor and grind out more than 200 pages of new and revised plant entries for catalogs shipped to all 50 states, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and other points of the compass. People who pore over seed and garden offerings have long treasured the Heronswood catalog, if only for Hinkley's quips, such as:

Fuchsia "Nettala" -- "So, it went like this. We found this fuchsia growing in our woods. The blossoms are bizarre, with very narrow petal bases expanding to rounded coral lobes, looking oddly enough like a sissified alien head, but still decidedly attractive, or at least more so than Sigourney Weaver in black leather with a shaven head. We mistakenly sold this last year under the name 'Alien.' It's Eric's fault."

Trifolium repens "Green ice"-- "I realize you are probably quite tired now, reading this endless diatribe of mine. Then you come to selected forms of clover and you are convinced that I have simply fallen off the edge into the black-holed universe of variegated madness. Well, relax. I haven't many of these, so I'm not even going to tell you what they look like. But I will tell you that everyone who has seen it has lusted for it. Just ask them. They live upstairs in my attic, and sometimes, well, we talk together all night long."

For all those interjections, Hinkley exudes a passion for botanicals and gardening that he says has been in him since he was a little boy on the family farm in Cadillac, Mich. And it comes through as he writes of autumn in the garden, when various ornamental grasses stand out as the more colorful perennials die off:

"I am convinced there is no one season in which we should be more or less drawn to the garden. In every instant on every day, the garden's evolution through the seasons provides fleeting moments, which we can if we choose to, extract and reflect upon. The grasses, in glory as well as decadence, help to remind me of this."

As he walks through the woodland garden, he points out various imported specimens that have taken strong hold and flourished in the fecund forest floor. Amid the trees and native plants. "We left much of the salal and huckleberry, which I think are important in any woodland garden," Hinkley said.

Great blue herons, namesakes for the wooded nursery and garden, still flourish in the scattered ponds and swampy areas. Deer have disappeared, but the gritty little mountain beavers still hang tenaciously onto their territory, making big meals of the plantings. "They love woody plants, but I can't worry too much about them. After all, they were here before we came; they came with the territory!" Hinkley said.

There are surprises around each green corner in the shady woods where sun slants down in streaks from the cathedral fir and cedar overstory. Hinkley points out a grouping of giant Asian lilies. "That one, Cardiocrinum gigantiumhas, a 12-inch flower that fills the woods with fragrance at the end of the summer," he said with a sense of awe.

There is no grid of wide paved paths here at Heronswood, just a soft network of people-size paths winding in the green understory, past natural ponds and ferny intersections. No room here for hunking machinery. "We have wheelbarrows and shovels," Hinkley says. They get around on bicycles and stay in constant touch by two-way radio.

Running the nursery and garden and writing catalogs and other books and dashing off to numerous speaking engagements doesn't seem to dent the energy or enthusiasm of 44-year-old Hinkley, who jolts himself with strong black coffee every 5 a.m. before his three-mile run with his spaniels Chico and Colle. But the former horticulture teacher at Edmonds Community College misses the autumn excitement of new classes. And being the boss at Heronswood takes a toll.

"The more that goes on here, the less I seem able to do the things I love most ... getting my hands down in the dirt. I have to do that to survive. And it's never ceased to thrill me."

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