It’s hard to imagine that we only have one week left until the doors open at the Northwest Flower & Garden Festival. Today, staff begins to disassemble and load our display components and much of our plant material into box trucks.

Despite our Festival hustle, our Nursery doors remain wide open as truck after truck of springtime deliveries are unloaded and merchandised into place. Our Fruit Tree List is now available and serves as an excellent resource in deciding which fruit and shrub varieties to add to your garden this year.

We thank each one of you for supporting us through our display garden journey and are thrilled to be able to share with you some of the inner workings that bring our interpretation of Beatrix Potter’s garden to life. Spring has never looked so hopeful!

Stephanie: What is the greatest plant challenge that you and the Christianson’s Team will face before the Festival?

Toni: Set-up is the greatest challenge. We are magical thinkers when it comes to time management. We have always planned on getting what would take 5 to 6 days of set-up into 3 1/2 days. This means we work late into the night and have been known to get only 2 hours of sleep on some nights during past set-ups.

Stephanie: What are some unusual things to look for in your garden?

Toni: Step-over stile, three types of English fencing, in-place compost pile, over summering house plants, overwintering veggies, antique tools, sea kale forcer, galvanized rhubarb forcer, and rolling greenhouse.

Stephanie: As a staff member, it’s been exciting to see the vivid details of your design come to fruition. Describe a few of your favorite design elements that gardeners will wonder about and who is assisting with their creation?

Toni: Our samples of three types of English fencing styles will be of interest. We will have a rail style fence built by our master carpenters, Carl and Mike, using salvaged wood from the 300-foot shade house we needed to take down at the Nursery because of its age. We’ll also have a dry stone fence built by Joshua from Vashon Island. He will be using stones from Marenakos Stone for this wall. And, last but not least, we will have a living fence designed and built by Laura who is a master at weaving plants and vines together to build anything from a seasonal wreath to topiary to a living fence. She also plants over 600 beautiful hanging baskets and numerous container gardens for spring and summer sales at our Nursery.

 

2/10/2020

Many of us remember England’s treasured author and illustrator, Beatrix Potter for her little animal tales such as “Peter Rabbit”, “Mrs. Tiggy Winkle”, and “Mr. Jeremy Fisher.” Today, her legacy is stronger than ever. 150 years after her death, one of her books are sold every 15 seconds!

Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top Farm: Every summer Beatrix Potter and her family rented a house in either Scotland or one in the Lake District, north of her birth city of Kensington, England. It was the Hill Top House (pictured above) where she was the happiest. As her affluent parents were over-protective, she mostly played with her younger brother and spent much of her youth drawing. She drew the world around her: nature scenes, animals, insects, and her favorite, fungi. Beatrix Potter composed many of her stories, inimitable drawings and books at Hill Top farm using the area’s rabbits, ducks, toads, buildings, ponds, and garden for inspiration.

“I do not remember a time when I did not try to

invent pictures and make for myself a fairyland

among … all the thousands of objects of the

countryside.” -Beatrix Potter

UK’s National Trust: Using the royalties she’d earned from her books, she purchased Hill Top House and Farm in 1903. With her inheritance, she bought more parcels of the land around the Sawrey area so as to preserve its outstanding natural beauty. In her later years, Beatrix focused less on her writing and more on practical things like farming and looking after her growing number of farms and acreage. In 1943, the year of her death, she bequeathed 18 farms and 4,000 acres of land to England’s National Trust with the condition that the land stays in the hands of farmers who will continue to farm the land and also tend a flock of Herdwick sheep; her beloved breed of sheep native to the fells of Sawrey. The National Trust has cared for Hill Top Farm and its surrounding farms by protecting its nature, beauty, and history since her death.

“Hill Top’s half-acre cottage garden still reflects

Beatrix’s own informal, higgledy-piggledy style.”

-NationalTrust.org.uk

As the Northwest Flower and Garden Festival (NWFGF) dates approach, sharing information about our preparations with our readers is paramount. Ultimately, we hope to inspire you with incremental articles and interviews about our upcoming display garden design.

I invited Toni Christianson to an interview to discuss this year’s display design and vision. She is the mastermind (admitted by her husband, John) whose imagination, creativity, and years of garden experience lead the way to memorable display gardens.

Stephanie: Thanks for joining me today, Toni. Tell me about the style of planting that will take place at the NWFGF at the end of this month.

Toni: Our garden is inspired by Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top Farm, located in the Lake District near Sawrey, England. She was a very private person and her gardens were for her own enjoyment. They definitely highlighted her love of nature and her personality. She did not try to control nature but to live side by side with nature. Our garden will reflect her more casual approach with annual and biennial plants left in the garden to set and throw seeds to come up as volunteers the next year. Today, we take out most of these plants once ‘they have gone over’ so they won’t reseed and take over but she left them to add color to her borders for years to come, only taking out the ones needed for other plantings.

Stephanie: What plants will you use to get that look?

Toni: Because forcing plants into flower ahead of their normal bloom time is dependent on weather, length of day, and soil and air temperatures, (all variables we try to control using 5 different heat and light zones in our greenhouses) we never know for sure which plants will make it to the show. The plants we’re hoping to coax into the role of volunteers are foxglove, violas, bluebells, pansies, and poppies. Primroses also fall into this category but most of their seeds need a cold winter to crack their outer shell in order to germinate. However, because we love them so, we’re still using many varieties including Yellow Cowslip and ‘Quaker’s Bonnet’.  You, therefore, need to pretend that England has had several very sharp, frigid winters in a row.  

Stephanie: How will you get roses and peonies to bloom by the end of February?

Toni: First we put them in the Conservatory where there is heat in the floor. We’ve learned that soil temperature is part of nature’s way of waking dormant plants. With bottom heat they are likely to push new growth sooner. In past shows we didn’t have the Conservatory so forcing roses and peonies was much more difficult and strictly a guessing game. After they are showing growth, we move them to the Propagation House until they develop buds and then they go into the Front Greenhouse until the buds are showing color. Then they go into either House #5 or directly outdoors to slow them down. This is still a guessing game so we always plan on forcing more plants than we need. Our usual success is that only one out of ten plants in this category will be blooming for the show.  

Stephanie: I would like to know, as our readers may, about the excerpt by Beatrix Potter you featured in the current edition of the Garden Gazette. (shown below) What made you choose it from all of her other writings?