Pacific Northwest Gardening: Heronswood is closing/moving, 1 by

wrote:
Another tree fern and our native Darmera peltata growing by the pond.
Here's a link to the Little and Lewis site, for anyone not familiar with the genius of their work.
http://www.littleandlewis.com/

And here is the text from the Seattle Post Intelligencer article:

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KINGSTON, Wash. -- The Heronswood Nursery, known around the world for its exotic plant collection, has been closed by the Philadelphia-based Burpee seed company six years after it bought the Northwest horticulture icon with promises to keep things as they were.

Burpee bought the nursery from founder Dan Hinkley, admired for his Indiana Jones-like quests for fine but little-known plants, and his partner, Robert Jones. Burpee told Hinkley to keep hunting down rare plants for the nursery's collection while Jones ran the business.

The photoless catalogs Hinkley produced annually had become collector's items. Through essays, books and his Heronswood Web site, Hinkley has kept the public abreast of his plant-hunting exploits.

George Ball, president of the W. Atlee Burpee & Co., the nation's oldest and arguably most successful home-gardening company, said they tried to make Heronswood profitable for six years, but decided the best thing would be to relocate.

"But we're not closing it, we're just moving it," he said of the nursery founded in 1987.

Turns out the move may be to online only.



Hans Miller, Burpee's vice president, said Tuesday that the company has no immediate plan to open a Heronswood nursery in Pennsylvania, where the company has a 50-acre nursery at Willow Hill and a similar-size test and display garden at Fordhook Farm in Doylestown.

Burpee will test the market for a Heronswood facility at an event dubbed the Heronswood Hydrangea Open at Fordhook Farm, July 14-15.

If it doesn't test well, Miller said, "Heronswood will just be a Web mail-order site."

The nursery on the Kitsap Peninsula, across Puget Sound northwest of Seattle, closed Tuesday. Of its 26 employees, seven were asked to work through the summer and the others were told their jobs were gone, Ball said.

The fate of Heronswood's famed display gardens is still unknown, although Ball said the company is not planning on digging up the plants and shipping them back East.

"I'm hoping to keep this as long as we can, hoping to find ... let's say ... someone who wants to buy one of the few first-class private botanic gardens certainly in America if not the world.

"But I haven't figured all that out yet."

Hinkley said he would keep himself busy lecturing and writing more books.

"This has been like dealing with a death in the family," he said. "We're sad because we believed in Heronswood and believed it was more than just a nursery. We were trying to contribute to the horticultural community and the community as a whole."

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On the Net:

Heronswood: http://www.heronswood.com/

Burpee: http://www.burpee.com