P-Town posh: Wine Walk, Garden & Art Faire testify to Palmer as a rising center for culture

PALMER — For old high school friends Davin Shifflea, Elise Harrison and Courtney Loyer, Friday night’s inaugural Palmer Wine Walk was more than just a celebration of their hometown’s burgeoning art scene; it was a reminder of why they’re glad to have moved back home.

Graduates of the PHS class of 2002, they soaked up the fine weather and fine wine of the brand new prologue to Palmer’s long-running Midsummer Garden and Art Faire.

“Palmer is a nice place to grow up in , move away from for a little while to realize what you liked about it,” Shifflea said. “You come back and know it’s not such a bad place. Growing up, you hate it because there’s nothing to do, but then you realize, it’s a really great place to raise kids in.”

All three acknowledged a burgeoning arts and culture scene in Palmer, driven largely by the growth and hustle and bustle of Wasilla.

“What I like about Palmer is there are so many laws so you can’t just build anything,” said Loyer. “I think they like to keep it very much the way it was. My husband’s family, on both sides, homesteaded this valley. They farmed the whole thing back in the days when Roosevelt sent everybody up here.”

Among those young, upwardly mobile professionals drawn from Wasilla Friday evening were couples Brian and Alicia Mayer and Zach and Sara Layman.

Alicia Mayer recently became a member of the Palmer Museum, naturally bought two tickets to the wine walk and, as luck would have it, won two more during the balloon pop contest.

“Palmer does seem to be more of a cultural center; it has that art and small-town feel,” Brian Mayer said. “Wasilla definitely has more commercial shopping, but if you want a hometown, artsy scene, Palmer is the place to be.”

Wine walkers bounced between seven businesses in downtown Palmer before returning to the garden for the nightcap. All this was a prelude to the bigger event, Saturday’s Garden and Art Faire.

Now with more than 70 vendors, the Garden & Art Faire spans 12 hours, going all the way to 10 in the evening with live music.

Among the event’s biggest draws is its biggest competition — the Rhubarb Rumble, in which area businesses and culinary experts do battle with dishes that include rhubarb as an ingredient.

Kevin Brown, owner of the Palmer Downtown Deli, stole the show under the information tent with his remarkably complex “Soba Noodle Salad With Alaska Sockeye Salmon and Rhubarb Ginger Vinaigrette.”

Brown, who also entered a rhubarb Italian soda in the beverage category, was in his first Rhubarb Rumble, in his first year as owner of the deli. He said about seven years ago, he was among the group that worked to save the Faire after it was evicted from its home at the Fairgrounds. They moved it to the downtown site at the borough green.

“I’ve loved this fair since we started this fair,” Brown said. “It’s grown from 16 businesses the first year to over 70. I’m happy to say I’m no longer one of the organizers and the people who are handling it now are amazing, way better than I was… This is the perfect location for it, right downtown. Every year it gets larger and takes over more of the downtown.”

Though Palmer is known best for its giant cabbages, Brown, who moved to town 10 years ago from Missouri, said rhubarb is a vegetable you simply can’t avoid in Alaska.

“It’s one of the easiest plants to grow in Alaska. Every Alaska front yard has rhubarb; they say you’re not really an Alaskan until you’re growing it,” Brown said. “It’s being looked at as it could be a real export plant for Alaska.”

Certain businesses of like purposes decided to combine forces at their vendor tents. Chief among these was the three-pronged union of Harmony, Marilyn’s Fibert Arts and Forever Endeavor. The last of the three featured a pair of live sheep, whose sheared fleece was woven on site by Forever Endeavor owner, Tara Pollock.

“We like to hang out together, we have similar products and it’s nice to have more people,” said Lynx (pronounced Link) Mullen, of Harmony. “I like the cynergy of all these fiber arts. Marilyn does the felting and fiber painting; I do a lot of the spinning and dyeing and Tara has her sheep, so it all works well together.”

Some vendors at the Faire, however, had no intention of selling anything at all. Among them was Jerry Rogers of the Cook Inlet Bonsai Study Group. With him were an array of bonsai trees, most of them of the Alaskan variety.

“Bonsai art means “tree in a tray,” so you can pretty much use any tree you want if you find it appealing,” said Rogers, whose fascination with Asian culture overrode his apathy for horticulture as a young man. “Some work better than others, so we use a lot of native Alaskan stuff because it lives. I love the Japanese maples, but they just don’t survive the length of winter here.”

None of the bonsai trees were for sale, but for businesses interested in expanding their market reach, the Midsummer Garden and Art Faire is just the thing.

“Palmer has a really great community and super business owners in this town that promote each other and that makes for great community events like this,” said nutrition educator Winona Benson of Nourished Health Coaching Services. “So yeah, we like it this way.”

Contact editor Matt Hickman at 352-2268 or matt.hickman@frontiersman.com.