Willow Garden Club: Annual tour is perennial favorite

WILLOW — These days, Willow is known as much for its annual garden tour as for the thousands of ounces of gold mined from the region during the past 100 years.

Saturday marks the 26th year the Willow Garden Club has organized a tour of local gardens as a fundraiser to benefit the club and various Alaska public gardens.

This year, funds will benefit the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Georgeson Botanical Gardens. Previously, the tour has helped raise money for the Alaska Botanical Garden in Anchorage, too.

For years now, Les Brake’s Coyote Garden has been one of the annual highlights for the 80 to 100 participants on the perennial tour. Brake said a much smaller version of his garden — just two flowerbeds — was part of the club’s first tour in 1986.

With its short growing season and long, cold winters, Willow seems like an unlikely place to find avid gardeners, but Brake said winter is what started him gardening.

“That first long winter in Alaska turned me into a gardener,” he said.

As a child growing up in west Texas, he said his mother had a flower and vegetable garden. Though he dabbled in gardening in Texas and later when in lived in Colorado, Brake said his first long, cold, dark, nearly colorless Alaska winter drove him to dig in the dirt.

“I knew if you wanted a garden, you could do it anywhere,” he said.

Still, the location of his garden, 7.5 miles up Willow-Fishhook Road in the Talkeetna Mountain Range, is part of what has turned the heads of national and international magazines — like Horticulture, Gardens Illustrated, Country Gardens, Sunset and New Zealand Gardener — and TV shows — like HGTV, which featured the garden in two series and two segments for the PBS show “Smart Gardening.”

“It’s territory that had never been covered before,” he said.

Brake’s hunger for color also led him to begin making ice arrangements using colored water and candles to enliven winter nights. These ice creations are featured in a six-page spread in Suzy Bales’ book “The Garden in Winter.”

Maybe such a garden would be expected in an urban area or at least somewhere with a more temperate growing season, but in the foothills of the Talkeenta Mountain Range it’s as unexpected delight.

But there is more to Coyote Garden than a collection of thousands of annual and perennial plants.

Carefully positioned throughout the garden’s “rooms” are handcrafted benches Jerry Conrad creates from pealed alder branches. Each bench is positioned to take advantage of the sun throughout the day, Brake said.

Conrad purchased the property in the spring of 1975, five years before the two men met by chance in Anchorage when Brake was on a vacation.

Though the spot wasn’t handpicked to be a garden, Brake said with the adjacent pond, the surrounding forest and a slight slope, it was a natural fit.

“It just seemed like this was a spot waiting for a garden,” he said.

The couple’s garden has three distinct phases, Brake said. There’s the garden as it existed before 1989, the garden with its middle room carpeted in grass and offset by gardens on its edges, and the tea house and its adjoining gardens are stage three, he said.

“In 1996 when he built the teahouse, that to me is when his craft changed to art,” Brake said of Jerry’s woodcraft artwork that accents the garden.

Brake said the benches, teahouse and fire circle in the garden reflect that this garden is a place to gather and exchange ideas.

“Gardening is one of those things you have to give it away to keep it,” he said.

In the back of the garden near the teahouse, Brake points out a Veronica plant given him by fellow Master Gardener Karin Covey. He said he recently gave her a start from his plant after hers died.

“We push plants on each other,” Covey joked. “We’ve been garden buddies for many years. I really admire him.”

Although she’s been a member of the Willow Garden Club for years, she’s never been on the tour.

“I’ve been kind of envious. I stay and work with Les and I don’t usually get to go on the tour,” Covey said.

In a word, she said she’d describe Brake as disciplined. While she said she struggles to choose a color scheme, Brake’s choices seem deliberate.

Where some local gardeners enjoy adding Alaska native plants to the mix, you won’t find many of these usual suspects in Brake’s garden. There are a few, though, like shooting stars, wild geraniums and forget-me-nots.

“There is so much native stuff just out the driveway,” he said.

For his garden, he’s looking for plants from correlating climates that will do well here, too. Plants that grow at the 10,000 to 12,000 foot range work perfectly, Brake said.

One of the stars of his garden is the high Himalayan Nomocharis. It’s somewhere between a lily and a fritillaria, but is so rare in cultivation that it doesn’t have a common name, Brake said.

Although the plant takes from five to seven years to produce bulbs from seed, he said the plant does very well here.

“Someone should commercialize it,” Brake said.

To join the Willow Garden Tour, meet at 9:30 a.m., Saturday at the Willow Community Center, Mile 69.8 of the Parks Highway. The tour is from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., and maps will be distributed of the gardens to visit. People are asked to pack a lunch to eat at Ron and Cindy Forsyth's garden.

For more information, contact Willow Garden Club president Marsha Van Abel 495-2080.

Contact Heather A. Resz at heather.resz@frontiersman.com or 352-2268.