"For the first time in a long time, everyone connected with Heronswood is happy.

Heronswood was founded as a rare plant nursery in 1987 by famed Indiana Jones-style international plant explorer Dan Hinkley and his partner, Robert Jones. Located in Kingston, Wash., on the Kitsap Peninsula across Puget Sound from Seattle, the nursery grew, literally, into a garden. Both the nursery and the garden gained worldwide recognition because many of the plants for sale and in the display beds had not been previously cultivated in North America.

In June 2000, Hinkley and Jones unexpectedly sold Heronswood to W. Atlee Burpee & Co. in Warminster, Pa. The sale sent shock waves, from academia — where researchers had helped Hinkley and Jones eliminate invasive plants from the collection — throughout global gardening circles, where many considered the Heronswood catalog a collector’s item. Hinkley said recently that he did not anticipate the intensity of dismay and disappointment the sale caused.

In July of this year, Burpee — never popular as an East Coast, corporate owner of the private Pacific Northwest nursery and garden — sold Heronswood and an adjoining property that it had purchased in December 2000 to an area Indian tribe, the Port Gamble S’Klallam tribe."

Get the Story:
Indian tribe buys famed rare plant garden, ancestral land (Mother Nature Network 10/18)

Related Stories:
Editorial: Garden in good hands with Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe (6/25)
Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe spends 'pretty fair chunk' on garden (6/21)