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courtesy Faith-Anne
Trudeau
by Cherie Winner
The next time you visit the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in
Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, take a good look around. This is
the only Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) facility in the nation that
is home to a botanical garden, and the garden is due primarily to
the efforts of one man.
The basic facts are easy to find. Carl English (’29 Botany) came
to the site in 1931. In 1967 the Corps gave him its highest award
for a civilian employee. Carl retired in 1974 and died two years
later. In 1978 the site was designated a national historic
district, due in no small part to Carl’s garden.
But who was Carl?
Michael Fleming, who served as horticulturist at the Chittenden
locks from 1978 to 1989, met English a few times but got to know
him mainly through the garden he had created and through stories
told by people who had known him well. There wasn’t much else to go
on, because English rarely wrote anything down. Whatever plans he
made, whatever test plantings and seed exchanges he did, the
details were all in his head.
“He never kept a record,” says Fleming. “I can’t figure out how
he did what he did without records.”
During his years at the site, Fleming would occasionally find
unusual plants that English had tucked into some odd corner and,
perhaps, forgot.
“There were things like that all over the garden,” he says. “It
was like a treasure hunt.”
An ACE report on the history of the locks says that when English
started working as assistant gardener there, the site had a
military feel, with neatly trimmed conifer trees standing guard at
sidewalk intersections. When he became the head gardener 10 years
later, English began using the seven-acre site as a botanical
canvas. He experimented with color, line, shape, and texture. He
created a layered effect with naturalistic groupings of shrubs and
trees, and his minimal pruning allowed the trees to achieve their
natural form. He developed several new cultivars, including the
scarlet horse chestnuts that now line the main walk. He planted
little-known natives of the Cascades that he and his wife, Edith
Hardin English (’24 Education, ’29 M.S. Zoology), collected during
back-country expeditions. He also planted species from other
continents, especially Asia, which he grew from seeds sent to him
by colleagues overseas or brought to him by sailors he befriended
as their ships passed through the locks.
English guarded his domain with parental ferocity. Fleming heard
tales of English turning the sprinklers on would-be picnickers and
brandishing a pitchfork at visitors who wandered onto the lawns.
According to the ACE report, “English saw the primary (only) role
of the garden as a botanical display, not as a park and least of
all as a playground.”
An article English wrote in 1972 for American
Horticulturist is one of the few records we have of his
thoughts about the garden in his own words.
“An effort is made to have something of interest at all times of
the year,” he wrote, adding that he did all his work in “hopes of
developing a garden that not only would be a joyous sight to see
but [would also be] worthy of serious study.”
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