Seattle Community Gardening History Project

Sundial at Bradner Gardens Park. An old landfill, an abandoned airstrip, reclaimed wetlands, a public utility right-of-way, the top of a parking garage! All these are bits of the urban landscape repurposed for the growing of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. One of the fascinating aspects of Seattle's community gardens is the variety of landscapes adapted for their use. Whether "interim" use or permanent, the gardens and p-patches have managed to find homes in odd and interesting places. In its own way, the story of locating gardens is one of waste not, want not. Dumping grounds Several p-patches have found a home on old dump sites. Dumps, both sanctioned and not, have typically been sited on undesirable land -- low-lying and perhaps swampy ground that is unsuitable for building. Such was the huge municipal dump and later landfill at Interbay, as well as the Montlake landfill, the latter on land reclaimed after the lowering of Lake Washington in 1916. Today the Interbay P-...

Every garden has a story. Tucked into a quiet neighborhood of Ballard is a garden with a particularly unique back story: The Kirke Park and P-Patch.      Remnants Those with a basic understanding of Germanic languages will recognize that the word Kirke means “church.” The park was given a Norwegian name to honor the Scandinavian heritage of the Ballard neighborhood. However, there was a more specific reason for the name: Kirke Park sits on the site of a religious community that once occupied the property for nearly 80 years – not a traditional house of worship as one might find in many neighborhoods, but the residence of a millennialist sect known as the Seventh Elect Church in Israel. Founded in 1922 by a 77-year old preacher, the church dictated chastity, vegetarianism, unshorn hair, and an unquestioning obedience to the authority of its founder, Daniel Salwt. Tall, imposing, with a long-white beard, Salwt ruled over a group of several dozen adherents who handed over ...