A Resource for Visitors: Plants of the Seattle Japanese Garden
By Corinne Kennedy
The cover of this year’s printed booklet, available online on the Garden’s website.
Plants of the Seattle Japanese Garden 2020 is the most recent issue of this annual Plant Booklet. Beginning in the 1990s, Garden Guide/Arboretum Unit 86 member Kathleen Smith devoted many years to photographing, identifying, and documenting the Garden’s plants. After her final Booklet was published, a Unit 86 Plant Committee was formed to continue her work. The committee began publishing annual Booklets in 2010, and undertakes other plant-related educational projects each year.
Like all gardens, the Seattle Japanese Garden is a challenging work in progress, as plants continue to grow and age, and need extensive maintenance, or removal and replacement. In the words of senior gardener Peter Putnicki, the gardeners are “constantly engaged in refining, adjusting and thinking about the dynamic, active and living aspect” of the Garden. That is, in addition to performing annual maintenance, they’re constantly engaged in shaping the Garden’s evolution. The Plant Committee is grateful to Peter and gardeners Miriam Preus and Andrea Gillespie for their dedication to the Garden and for providing us with critical information about changes to the plant collection.
This year’s Booklet was produced by Plant Committee chairperson Kathy Lantz and members Hiroko Aikawa, Maggie Carr, Sue Clark, Corinne Kennedy, Aleksandra Monk and Shizue Prochaska. The Booklet is a spreadsheet, divided into 28 plant areas, that identifies plants by botanical name, common name, size, plant number, location, and a brief description. Garden visitors may also be interested in other plant resources created by committee members. Aleksandra Monk, the committee’s chief photographer, posts information about bloom times and seasons of interest on two blogs that she maintains – the SJG Community Blog and related SJG Bloom Blog. Corinne Kennedy contributes plant-related blog articles to the SJG website.
Corinne Kennedy is a Garden Guide, frequent contributor to the Seattle Japanese Garden blog, and retired garden designer.