Staff, volunteers prep Oregon Garden for the busy season

Delen Kitchen was a child when her father and sister took the hourlong drive from Portland for her first trip to the Oregon Garden in Silverton.

She never wanted to leave. And she never has.

“Ever since I was about 12 years old, I knew I wanted to work at the garden,” said Kitchen, now the operations manager of the 80-acre botanical garden 42 miles southwest of Portland. “I always tell people it’s my dream job. Coming to the garden is what made me want to pursue a career in horticulture.”

Kitchen returned as a summer intern at the garden while she was earning her bachelor of science degree in urban horticulture at Arizona State University. She joined the staff in 2015 as the garden’s membership coordinator and was promoted to assistant general manager in 2018 and the director of operations in 2020.

She now oversees 80 acres with more than 20 specialty gardens, including a conifer garden with one of the largest collections of dwarf and miniature conifers in the United States.

April 1 officially marks the beginning of the garden’s busy season, Kitchen said. Staff and volunteers spent February and March busily preparing for the new growths and influx of visitors.

The garden employs 17 permanent staff members, with seven of them serving on the horticulture team. “That’s a little more than 10 acres per person to take care of,” Kitchen said. “That’s a lot of work for our staff.”

Additional staff are hired during the spring and summer months to drive the garden tram and provide other guest services. The garden also has more than 70 ongoing volunteers who work at least one shift per week.

Monica Duran of Silverton works a lot more than one shift a week. She volunteers at the garden almost every weekday. “I had been to the garden several times before, and I thought it was just a beautiful place,” Duran said.

“This is the greatest volunteer job in the world,” she said, “You get to be outside. You get to be with nature. You see things you never see. You learn things from all of the staff. It keeps your brain going, and it keeps your body in good shape.”

There is plenty of work to do in the days and weeks leading up to the busy season, Kitchen said

“Spring gives us the energy and motivation to go outside and work,” she said. “We get a little tired after months of working in the rain and the cold. It’s helpful for the people at the garden and helpful for the plants too.”

Kitchen said she keeps her fingers crossed that Oregon’s spring weather remains consistently warm and sunny.

“If you get this warm weather and then you get another cold snap, it can confuse the plants, and you can lose some of your blooms,” she said. “Hopefully, we’re not going to see another freeze.”

The Oregon Garden was founded in 1999 by members of the Oregon Association of Nurseries. Association members began discussing the idea of a public showcase garden in the 1940s.

The garden’s 25-acre native Oregon white oak grove features the 400-year-old Signature Oak. Standing 100 feet, it is one of Oregon’s Heritage Trees. The trees survived January’s freeze extremely well, Kitchen said. “Most of what we had here is pretty hardy,” she said.

Plants aren’t the only living organisms disturbed by inconsistent weather. “A lot of gardening is a metaphor for humanity,” Kitchen said. “We’re all very similar living creatures.”

Spring preparations begin with such tasks as pruning roses and hydrangea bushes.

“Those are two plant groups we always hit in late February, early March to make sure we get really big, beautiful roses and hydrangea for the upcoming season,” Kitchen said.

“We’re doing a lot of pruning and cutbacks of our other perennials throughout the garden,” she added. “A lot of that happens in the fall, but anything we didn’t get to in the fall we overwinter, and we’ll go ahead this time of year and continue to prune and cut that back.”

The garden’s daffodils, crocuses and grape hyacinth began peeking out in mid-March. Prunus species such as cherries, crabtrees and apples are also early spring bloomers. Magnolias and rhododendrons will soon follow.

Even while eagerly anticipating new buds, Kitchen said garden staffers and volunteers are also excited about the return of local water services April 1.

“We have an agreement with the City of Silverton for the use of their effluent water,” she explained. “We don’t need that in the wintertime because we’re getting plenty of rain, but we always look forward to that April 1 date because we will start testing all of our irrigation systems.”

Testing is no small task, she added.

“That’s something we do every spring, and it keeps us really busy,” Kitchen said. “We spend about two weeks in early April making sure everything is good to go so we can water all of our plants throughout the summertime.”

Visitors as well as plants enjoy the water in early April. Water features such as the Amazing Water Garden spring back to life. The attraction is a circular water garden with an ornate bridge, criss-crossing paths and a cascading waterfall.

April also marks the return of the garden’s summer hours when it will be open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (It closes at 3 p.m. during the fall and winter.) The tram is available to wind visitors through the grounds starting April 1.

Spring and summer attract more than 70,000 people to the garden.

“We’re ready for all of that foot traffic that comes in the spring -- from gardening to getting our guest services staff ready to welcome guests to preparing and cleaning the garden to getting the pathways ready and removed of moss,” Kitchen said.

Jethro Ball said he couldn’t wait for spring. He and Nicholas Nerderman, his partner in Fine Garden Crafters in Salem, took a day off in March just to walk about the garden and come up with ideas for their own business.

“There’s an awful lot to look at and a lot of good examples,” Ball said.

“Plants are addictive,” he added. “We actually moved out to Oregon from New Mexico where we were doing landscaping. We came on a vacation and saw the gardens out here and decided this is where we wanted to do our career.”

Gardening has become more of a challenge in Oregon in recent years, Kitchen said.

“We’ve had a lot more wild fluctuations of weather,” she said. “It definitely impacts our business. We’ve had much wetter and longer springs the last two years. That has impacted the start of our busy season.”

Western Oregon had wetter weather through April and well into May in both 2022 and 2023. “You don’t get that early spring foot traffic that can be detrimental to our visitation and revenue,” said Kitchen.

“Everything has shifted,” she added. “We also get longer summers. We used to end our summer season at the end of September. Now we run all the way through October because we’ve been seeing really beautiful Octobers the last few years. You kind of lose it on the front end and gain it on the back end.”

In addition to the garden itself, the site three miles southeast of Silverton also includes the Gordon House, designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1957 for Evelyn and Conrad Wright of Wilsonville. The 2,133-square-foot home was moved to Silverton in 2001. Tours are regularly offered.

The 103-room Oregon Garden Resort is also adjacent to the main garden site.

Both the Gordon House and Oregon Garden Resort are separate entities from the garden itself. “We have a nice little community of businesses that have synergy with one another,” Kitchen explained.

The garden offers such distinct amenities as a visitors center, gift shop and cafe. It also hosts Garden University, a series of gardening workshops. A workshop at 11 a.m. Saturday, June 1, will look at earthquake preparedness as it relates to gardening.

While it’s not exactly a secret garden, Kitchen said, the Oregon Garden might be unfamiliar to some Portland residents because of its distance outside the metro area.

“I personally think it’s a real quick, beautiful drive from Portland, depending on which way you come,” she said. “We sometimes have trouble drawing visitors from Portland just because of the distance, but I think it’s well worth it to come down here.”

Silverton itself is worth the visit as well, she added.

“I love this little town,” Kitchen said. “It’s like a little arts community. There’s great art. There’s farmers markets. There’s a crafters market. There’s so much music. There’s great local food. The community is just super strong. They have so many fun annual events. There’s a lot to love about Silverton.”

Now is the time to visit both Silverton and the Oregon Garden, she said. “As soon as the weather is good, people start coming out here to walk and just see what’s going on,” she added.

“We get asked all of the time when’s the best time to visit the garden,” Kitchen said. “We say late May to early June because that’s when you’re going to get the best cross-section of perennial flowers as well as the annuals that we plant. Our annuals go into the ground late April and early May, and so we plant about 30,000 annuals that we grow and produce on site.”

The plants are all quite lovely, Duran said, but there is something equally beautiful about the garden.

“The people are wonderful, especially my fellow volunteers,” she said.

“Sometimes as we age, we make the mistake of rolling over and complaining about how we feel all the time,” she added. “These people do not. They’re involved. They’re interested. We have some bionic people who have more replacement parts than you’ve ever seen, but they keep going.”

IF YOU GO. The Oregon Garden is open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 879 W. Main St., Silverton. More information is available by calling 503-874-4294 or online at oregongarden.org.

— Tom Henderson, for The Oregonian/OregonLive