Willows Lodge Hidden Gem: Its Gardens

Living in a region where the sky is usually a varying a shade of gray looking to plants to bring in color becomes essential. Home gardens with flowering plants are not the product of an eager hobbyist, no; those blooms of color are a weapon against Spring onset SAD. April showers do indeed bring May flowers as long and the rain doesn’t beat them down leaving them a lying the dirt, looking trampled.

So where do you go to see a lovely garden if you’ve a black thumb? Or no yard at all? Not a problem, here in Woodinville there is a spectacular garden full of color and calm, and touring it will only cost the price of a glass of wine or a Happy Hour cocktail. And no, it is not a winery.

, situated along the Sammamish Slough is one of the most beautiful examples of an environmental friendly garden around (note: the Heritage Garden further down the Sammamish River Trail is another lovely, sustainable garden—story coming just as soon as I can get out there to take photos). There gardens were created for the hotel’s guests, or customers of , the hotel’s bar, which opens onto one of the hotel’s four distinctive gardens.

Beauty and sustainability are the guiding principles behind the creation of the gardens, according to EagleSong, the hotel’s Director of Natural Beauty, yep, her real title.

“I was the head gardener and there was a shift call it a paradigm shift when we realized that nature is an amenity for our hotel,” she said. “If we only think of what we do out there as operations or grounds it never gets its due.”

EagleSong , who has been tending the gardens for nine years now, said viewing the grounds as a maintenance issue meant keeping it static.

“Cause maintenance means you keep everything the same and gardens are about change in life and abundance and beauty. So by changing the way we perceive the outdoors here we really change the way we care and tend it,” she said.

The landscape viewed from the parking lot at Willows Lodge is nice, but nothing to you wouldn’t expect from a high-end hotel. If that’s all you ever see of the gardens at the lodge, you’re missing out. The grounds at Willows Lodge are actually a series of gardens, each with its own character, with new garden debuting this spring. Like any good garden design, the landscape at the Lodge is and ongoing process.

There’s the Gazebo Garden which is also the vegetable and herb garden for The Herb Farm, the restaurant is located just across the parking lot. In addition to just being really pretty, it’s a great example of gardening in raised beds. Herbs, vegetables and flowers grow together in a series of cedar boxes that surround an outdoor patio. Something is always blooming here. It’s also were you’ll find the hotels resident pigs. Why are there pigs there? Didn’t really get a good answer on that one, basically they are there just for fun.

Then there is the courtyard, just off Fireside Cellars, with a meandering path, fire pit, water fall and a round, stone building that looks a bit like Hagrid’s hut.

Walking from the hotel along the slough is the pine forest planted as mitigation for building the hotel. Now that the trees are mature, there is little EagleSong and her crew need to do to it, preferring to let nature take its course.

“It’s about giving a right of way to the wild things, the other than human life,” she said. “The beavers have taken on the job of thinning small trees for us.”

Weeding the garden is done by hand, less than a quart of herbicide a year is used on the 5-acre hotel grounds. The only herbicide is used at all is because of guests expectations that gravel paths will be grass free, something EagleSong hopes will change over time.

“We’re waiting for the aesthetic to catch up with the sustainability so we have to dance with what people expect to see and what the landscape can actually provide,” she said.

To EagleSone the gardens are meant to be a place to enjoy the bounty and beauty of nature.

“When people come here I want them to experience a feeling when they’re in the gardens, that feeling of abundance that feeling of life. That they feel well held here surrounded by beauty.”