A Brief History of The Cutting Garden
    (See a pictorial representation of this story.)

After taking early retirement from Boeing in 1998, my husband Tom and I sold our Issaquah home and small cut-flower business to a land developer, which enabled us to buy a 24-acre farm in Sequim, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula.

Since our Issaquah home and gardens were going to be bulldozed to make way for 500 condominiums, we moved most of our perennial plants and 270 varieties of dahlias to our new farm where they would become the foundation for the extensive gardens we envisioned. For weeks we dug, potted, transported and heeled in dozens of rhododendrons, peonies, iris, dahlias, bleeding heart, aster and chrysanthemum… every plant that we thought had a chance of surviving the move.

The previous owners of our new farm kindly allowed us to kill out an acre of pasture sod a few weeks before the sale closed. Tom quickly mastered the two bottom plow and the disc we had just bought for our 1948 Ford tractor as he created a one acre area for our cutting garden. We found a local dairy farmer who was eager to “clean up” 400 yards of well composted cow manure, so we contracted one neighbor to haul the manure to our garden site and another neighbor to roto-till it into the soil. On a sunny day in early May, we closed the sale of our new farm, and planted 3,000 dahlia tubers in the richly amended sandy loam. What an auspicious beginning! In subsequent years, we have started thousands of seedlings in our greenhouse to plant both in The Cutting Garden and in the perennial gardens around the Farmhouse.

The rules of our 1031 exchange specified that we had just six months to re-create the small business we had sold to the developer in Issaquah. In addition to our home, we had sold a 90-year old Farmhouse, two large chicken sheds, and a greenhouse. We now quickly built a new “old style” Farmhouse, two out buildings, and a greenhouse.

When The Farmhouse was complete, we were overwhelmed by the task of designing and creating something beautiful from four open, grassy acres of pasture, and the hundreds of plants that we had brought with us from our previous gardens. A neighbor recommended garden designer Sharon Nyenhuis of Bentley Gardens.  Though she didn’t have the time to install or maintain our gardens, she agreed to create the initial design, take us shopping for additional plant material, and place the plants in the new garden beds once we had prepared the soil. But first she asked for our vision for the gardens. “We want to be on the cover of American Homestyle and Gardening magazine in three years!” we told her. “Oh, now I understand the scale of the project!” she replied with good humor.

In the summer of 1999, we followed Sharon’s recommendation of using ¼” minus crushed basalt for the garden pathways, and a locally available “nutritious mulch” (pure washed cow manure) both as an amendment to the soil and as a mulch for the gardens. With miles of garden hose and a dozen sprinklers, we began creating lush lawns from the native pasture grass.

Now we just had to figure out what to do with our creation. We attended a small local wedding show in February of 1999 and hosted 17 weddings here in the summer of 2000. Since that time, our garden wedding venue has hosted hundreds of weddings. I am the florist for almost all the weddings, creating truly garden-fresh arrangements from the thousands of blooms available in our Cutting Garden.

In the fall of 2000, we planted 3,000 Grosso lavender plants and joined the local lavender-growers association. During the summers of 2001 and 2002, our farm was one of eight farms toured by thousands of visitors from the greater Seattle area.

After a few growing seasons, we realized that many of the plants we loved were not suited to the moist, rich diet offered by our perennial gardens, so in March of 2004 we put in our first xeriscape (non-irrigated) garden. We filled it with lavenders, sages, lupines, grasses, poppies, penstemons, potentillas and rosemary. It was such a glorious success that this spring we put in another large dry garden to greet our guests as they come toward The Farmhouse from the parking lot. Since Sequim is the driest place in Western Washington (we get just 13” of rain a year,) these gardens are of great interest to our many visitors.

I hope you will find your way to Sequim sometime soon and take a couple of hours to come by and tour our gardens (weekdays are best so you can avoid crashing a wedding). We always enjoy sharing our "joyous excess" with others. - Tom and Catherine