Windcliff: an American life story in two gardens

“Gardening is a lot like skiing,” Dan Hinkley has just proposed, but I need persuading. For this renowned American gardener, the similarity is that the
first two or three times down the hill remain for ever the most pleasurable, but once we start to perfect our style, then the work begins and “it becomes, well, work”. Hinkley is a horticultural maestro, an admired nurseryman and also a plant collector in the wild. I hate skiing, and have never progressed beyond those first few times down a slope. Gardening is quite different. I enjoyed my first years of it, but many years later, I enjoy my current ones even more.

During the recent freezing weather, I took refuge in Hinkley’s latest book, Windcliff: A Story of People, Plants, and Gardens. It is a rewarding ticket to quite another world. His gardening has mostly been in Seattle, concentrating on two sites. As he well observes, Sleepless in Seattle is “the movie in which it never stops raining”.

In his first garden, Heronswood, he assumed in 1990 that the style to follow was “the colour-driven double mixed border and assorted contrivances, following the English straight down the garden path”. At the time he was teaching horticulture to adults at Edmonds Community College, but the “English style” as presented in books and photos formed his first ideals. In his potager and his flowery borders, he was “possessed by something indescribable — something between resolve, rapacity, insistent hunger, and adamant refusal to fail”.

As ever, the styles of English gardens are more varied than summaries imply. Heronswood also had an acreage of woodland and it was there that Hinkley feels he freed himself by making a garden “evoking bits of nature” and planting it informally with ever more unusual choices and contrasts of height and shape. On a broader view, that style too could be matched in England and, indeed, Hinkley developed strong links with Christopher Lloyd, the garden teams at Great Dixter, Rosemary Verey and, eventually, with English field botanists and Crûg Farm nursery’s owners, fellow collectors of seeds from the wild.

In Hinkley’s hands the wilder look at Heronswood prospered. The garden attracted ever more visitors and the accompanying nursery became a famous source of extremely unusual plants. Its catalogues of them had artistic, flowery covers.

He was not out there alone. In October 1983, he tells us, he had his “first date with a man I had met in a gay square dance group called the Puddletown Squares”. Robert Jones has been with him ever since, designing his homes and helping the gardens’ plans to evolve, since 2013 as his husband. In 2006 the two of them left Heronswood and moved to Windcliff, a demanding site that they had acquired some six years earlier. The nursery had grown too big to be fun. They wanted a different challenge.

Windcliff sounds suitably challenging. It sits on a bluff about 200ft above the chilled salt water of an inlet of Puget Sound, looking across to the “raincatcher peaks” of the high Olympic range. The soil and the local deer do it no favours. Hinkley set about a “parched mostly lifeless high bluff” while Jones designed a new house on site. Six years later, it was joined by Hinkley’s ex-garden. In 2012, he was invited back to be the director of Heronswood, now owned by the Port Gamble S’Kallam tribe of indigenous people. He was obliged to face once again the mistakes he had made there. He took the opportunity to “do it right this time and ultimately leave Heronswood with grace”.

The story of two gardens, both newly made and one remade, has unusual possibilities. Windcliff, however, is mostly a book about Windcliff. It is not a story of garden-making told with a straight timeline. It jumps around, but it repays close attention on several levels wherever you live and garden. The style is ebullient, at times more like a series of hyperactive talks, but
it has some sharp insights, arrestingly expressed. “If the definition of a nursery is an enterprise where plants are produced in excess of the mother plant, then by default, anyone who gardens has a nursery”.

It presents many fine plants that are never seen in English gardens. It pays due tribute to American gardeners too, Panayoti Kelaidis, senior curator at the fine Denver Botanic Gardens, being an inspiration. It takes an honest, practical look at attempts to make a meadow garden on the site of a former lawn. It is realistic about wildlife, especially chipmunks and rabbits: “weasels will dispatch both, and rare daytime sightings of this secretive predator are satisfyingly not uncommon”.

Hinkley, now 66, has much to say about collecting plants in the wild, of course only under licence. The tales from Vietnam would be worth a book on their own. He has spent weeks in testing conditions and introduced gardeners to some lovely plants from seed. He is aware of the perils of letting in an invasive species but is opposed, as I am, to use of nothing but locally “native” plants. His account of the pink-white Magnolia sapaensis is a fine riposte. Seed was collected in northern Vietnam in 1999 and the result was recognised as a new species in 2011.

It takes skill, resolve and, Hinkley might add, a touch of craziness to collect, propagate, place and please so many rewarding plants in such proximity. He is against planting in one pre-planned flurry. He advises a steady three-year timescale and the building up of stocks of plants after seeing which will actually flourish. He is invaluably realistic, a virtue absent from airbrushed encyclopedias for beginners that are put out by the RHS. When he tries new plants, he jumps in “believing most of what I am including is going to die and happily embrace those that successfully swim to shore for another day”. In his mind’s eye is the scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in which Robert Redford has to jump off a cliff, but complains in fright to Paul Newman that he cannot swim. “Are you crazy?” Newman replies, “the fall will probably kill you.”

He is particularly good on the need for balance in a garden’s basic design, the “first cousin to repetition”. He began by planting borders “as flat as
a flounder, devoid of the exclamatory peaks between dips and valleys”. He feels that balance is more easily sensed in a garden if we blur our vision (“a freshly cut onion will do it”) and then feel the “weight of mass and color across a space”. I have attained it by accident, without an onion.

As the effect of the onion fades the ultimate joy of the book shines through, the fine plants that Hinkley’s travels, contacts and skill have brought into his surrounds. He has an excellent chapter on so-called climbers grown flat on the ground. His rare hydrangeas look enviable. I have never even heard of, let alone seen, many of his discoveries, from Viburnum furcatum, which he really rates, to white Impatiens tinctoria from Mount Kenya “but perfectly hardy in the ground”. Amazing energy and enterprise propel his life but with a wonderful ability to notice and rethink. After many runs down the slope there is still so much ahead for happy gardeners.

Daniel J Hinkley, “Windcliff: A Story of People, Plants and Gardens” (Timber Press). Robin Lane Fox will be in discussion with gardener and writer Sarah Raven at the FT Weekend Digital Festival, March 18-20; ftweekendfestival.com

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