Originally published Saturday, January 10, 1998

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

On sunny weekend mornings when most folks were sleeping in, and on rainy weekday mornings when they wish they could, there goes John Dixon, pushing his wheelbarrow up the streets of Shoreline.

In the wheelbarrow might be a newly dug up dogwood or western red cedar or snowberry or whatever other fine-specimen shrub, perennial or native wildflower he could sweet-talk out of a soft-touch homeowner.

John, an athletic, wiry 52-year-old landscaper, is one of those people with a mission. That he chooses one outside his own neighborhood doesn't bother him in the least. For within a comfortable 1-mile wheelbarrowing distance is Twin Ponds Park.

And John's mission, which has won increasing support from the neighborhood, is to transform a rubble-filled wetland into a neighborhood arboretum within Twin Ponds.

Tree by tree, shrub by shrub, wheelbarrow load by wheelbarrow load, this fellow has dug his way into the project and the neighborhood's growing identity. David Bannister, president of the Parkwood Neighbors Association, voiced enthusiastic support for John's Twin Ponds project.

"We heard about his project last spring and we invited him to one of our meetings and then we toured the area in the summer and decided to support John in his efforts. We have had work parties out there with him, and will have more, and we are supporting him financially."

Although the neighbors have paid for many of the plantings, John has talked as many or more out of the grounds and gardens of sympathetic homeowners looking for a way to thin out their own properties. "It didn't quite start out like that, but most of those conifers you see over there, the western red cedars and that noble fir and that ornamental spruce and the Colorado spruce, they've all been donated by people who learned about this project," John said.

One coastal redwood now prospering in another location had a poignant beginning at Twin Ponds. "In the spring of 1990, when a good friend was about to marry, I gave him a list of about 20 trees and told him that we'd plant whatever species he chose in honor of the marriage," John said. "Of course, don't you know he'd pick a coastal redwood. We didn't have room for something that would grow that big, so we scouted around and found this big bare area behind a giant mass of blackberries over there, behind the tennis courts. We got permission from the (then King County) parks people to plant and began to dig.

"That's when we learned why it was bare. Someone had filled-in a wetland with literally tons and tons of concrete and asphalt rubble. Well, we dug what we could and planted the tree in all that rocky soil. Naturally, it began to die.

"And the friend's marriage seemed to go on the rocks as well. I told him that the coastal redwood sprouts from the base, and that we could take some cuttings to give it a second chance. I also told him to give his marriage another chance, to work harder at making it grow."

Now John is a landscaper with a degree in ornamental horticulture, not marriage counseling, but the re-sprouted redwood was transplanted to the friend's property and began to prosper. "And the friend and his wife got some counseling and began to garden together and their marriage is as vibrant now as the tree," he said with a smile.

Which has absolutely nothing and everything to do with John's Twin Ponds project. He has adopted this 21-plus-acres of precious wetland, woods and play areas as a sort of quiet place for all of us. "The small arboretum area will be a place where people can walk among different planting focal points, but there should be uncharted, unplanned areas here in the woods, where kids can climb up in a tree and do whatever it is that kids and their imaginations do."

To that end, John devotes a whole lot of time and sweat to digging out monster chunks of concrete and truckloads of asphalt rubble that someone was allowed to dump here even before Shoreline became a city.

Since that first hole dug in 1990, John and whatever volunteers he could corner have planted more than 50 trees and more than 300 plants. "And a whole lot more are planned, of course," he said with a weary smile.

"A lot of the volunteer work we need is just maintenance," he added. "All those blackberries that had to be dug out . . . if we don't maintain what little we've been able to do, they'll come marching back in with a vengeance and this whole area would be covered in blackberry again in a year."

Another volunteer planting -- this one another western red cedar -- comes with a story of sorts. "A friend's son started it from a seed, and for about 18 years it was growing in a patio pot. It was getting root-bound, and the young man wanted to eventually plant it some place he owned, where he could watch it grow.

"But he told his father that there wasn't any property around here that he could afford. And there was that tree, wasting away in the pot. Eventually we learned about it, and now it's planted over there. He can come here any time, bring his children when he has them, and he can show them the tree he planted as a boy."

This is a man whose vision encompasses a whole lot of people and plants, and the vision grows almost as fast as those blackberries. Almost.

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