Washington Hospitality

If you like Conifers that suffer from a lack of size and overabundance of character, make an appointment to visit Bob and Dianne of Coenosium Gardens.

http://www.coenosium.com/

You will be impressed by their collections (for sale and private), then you will round a bend and find yet another enormous heard of tiny trees dotted across a forest hillside. And again.

Then there are the full-sized cultivar collections... A person can get lost in the big ones, but at least it will be in a place full of varied colours, shapes, sizes, and textures of tree...

Yes.

Cedrus deodara 'Feeling Blue,' above, both comments on the boringness of cone-shaped conifers and solves the problem itself.

I personally find myself attracted to this puddle of a plant- Weeping Hemlock

Tsuga heterophylla 'Thorson's Weeping'

Case in point, the steward of any postage-stamp or rockery or large pot-on-patio-you-refer-to-as-your-garden-and-rightly-so should award it with solid evergreen interest.

Cedrus atlantica 'Glauca' at Wells Medina:

Better known to locals and far nearer to the heart of Seattle, is, for discerning and serious gardeners, the classy Wells Medina. It's a nursery, I write, since that's not in the name.

Every gardener and his dog (you think I'm joking, but it was a five-to-one ratio when I was there, in favour of the humans, but that is still more dogs than your average nursery.) come to peruse their gallery of colourful plants under the diffused Seattle sun:

And after an exhausting day of looking at plants (quiet please) I make my daily cafe pilgrimage to write this blog. Better yet, I fall into lectural discourse with the cafe's window washer, a brilliant lovely warm oven of a man who has a lot to share about history, morality, spirituality, the nature of wisdom, and what constitutes a burrito by definition.

Thanks David.