The Hoffman Wonder Garden invites you to join us Friday, April 25th at 5pm for an exhilarating journey through the plant world with the celebrated American plantsman and adventurer, Dan Hinkley. The event will be held at NCRD in Nehalem. Tickets are available here.
Centuries back, world-renowned plant explorers traipsed through inhospitable terrain collecting specimens and seeds from beguiling plants unknown to modern horticulture.
Some of those explorers died grizzly deaths, most notably David Douglas (he of the Douglas fir), who, while botanizing in Hawaii, allegedly fell into a pit and was mauled by a bull. Others succumbed to heart attacks and diphtheria or lost limbs in landslides, many of them barely surviving disasters all for the love of botany.
“Me? I was in Northeast India,” remembers one explorer. “I had to pull a leech out of my friend’s mouth while wearing gloves in the pouring rain. He’d just eaten chocolate and I couldn’t get a grip on the leech. We were laughing so hard I peed my pants!”
Introducing the best-known American plantsman of our century, Dan Hinkley, a man as self-effacing as he is renowned, an intrepid explorer and passionate gardener whose curiosity has propelled him to explore much of the world’s flora for almost 40 years.
“Looking at a plant in the wild has been the most informative process for me as a gardener,” he says of his plant-hunting journeys. “Immediately I know where that plants wants to grow, what it’s rightful place might be.
“Certainly a plant might not grow as well as it does in its native haunt. But sometimes, when there’s less competition for survival, a plant can do even better in the garden.”
Dan Hinkley’s horticultural education began just about the time he could walk, when his dad gave him a gourd seed. (“I planted it about a foot deep.”) He graduated to planting orange seeds from his mom’s kitchen and vividly recalls seeing the first leaves appear.
“That’s when I became a student of horticulture. And still am.”
Not surprisingly, Dan went on to study botany and set his sights on teaching horticulture. (“My parents figured they’d be supporting me all my life”). He left his native Michigan to take a teaching job in the Seattle area, where he and his partner (now husband, Robert L Jones) settled.
“When Robert and I moved into our first home, I had seven truckloads of plants. Without my even realizing it, I had become a nurseryman.”
Had he ever. The Kingston, WA. nursery was called Heronswood and would soon become one of the most revered mail order nurseries inside and outside the U.S.
“Our timing was perfect,” he says of Heronswood. “This was the late 80’s, early 90’s and the perennial craze both in Europe and the US was close to insanity. We rode that crest and it was amazing. And exhausting.”
The gardens at Heronswood became a plant worshipper’s Mecca and Dan Hinkley its unwilling high priest.
“It’s the truth. Heronswood became a heavy weight for us. Robert and I would be in our underwear having coffee looking out the breakfast window and there’d be people we didn’t know looking back at us.”
The couple later sold Heronswood, which is now thriving under the stewardship of the Port S’Klallam Tribe. Their current Indianola, WA. nursery and garden, Windcliff, is open by appointment only but lists its exhaustive plant offerings online.
Now 72, Dan Hinkley has amassed an astonishing amount of horticultural wisdom and experience, along with a kaleidoscope of images from his gardens. But what makes him truly excel as a lecturer, and why we’re so excited to present him, is Dan’s humility, humor, and uncanny ability to put gardeners at any level at their ease.
“I am a student of walking around with a 4-inch pot of something under my arm,” he says of his approach to garden design, “looking for a perfect place to plant it. And as I’m walking around, I inevitably dig up three other plants that weren’t in the right place either and now I’ll be carrying all of them around all day.”
Sounds about right. We look forward to seeing you at the NCRD Performing Arts Center to hear one of the finest entertainers and down-to-Earth superstars we know, plantsman Dan Hinkley.
