A loss for all of us (corporate bastards strike again)

After taking it over in 2000, Burpee has closed down Heronswood Nursery, a legendary plant resource and showplace in Kingston, Washington.

I have saved all the Heronswood Gardens catalogs I’ve ever received since I first heard of the nursery five years ago. These fascinating, highly literate publications are worthy additions to the bookshelf of anyone who cares about plants and gardening. I think I only ordered once: a geranium phaeum "Samobor" whose delicate, reflexed flowers are in bloom as I write this. Maybe a few other plants that year.

Of course, I’ve never been there, but that has only added to the romance of nursery director Dan Hinkley’s stories of gathering unknown cultivars from the high Himalayas during his regular collecting explorations. These essays punctuated the listings of every catalog; in 2000, the nursery published an anniversary book including essays by Jamaica Kincaid and other writers. There were never any photographs in the Heronswood catalogs; the prose was enough to get you excited about their offerings of unusual geraniums, hellebores, campanula, peonies, and other plants.

We hear now that Burpee considered that the catalog had too much reading and too many offerings; in fact, they introduced an abbreviated catalog with the usual garden porn photographs a couple years back. The old Heronswood catalogs are now sold as “books.”

What a shame. A defeat for literacy, romance, and the availability of truly unique plant cultivars.

(I learned about this while browsing Growing with Plants.)