Queen Anne

Queen Anne
(submitted by a Queen Anne P-Patch community gardener)

Seattle started its recent history with more rugged topography than currently exists. As streets were built, hill sides bulldozed and other major civil projects undertaken, the fill wound up in ravines and crevices throughout the city. Building the Seattle Center provided much of that fill for various nooks and crannies of Queen Anne. The current location of the Queen Anne P-Patch is at the head of the Wolf Creek Ravine, a ravine which once extended across Boston street at the top of the hill. Neighbors of the P-Patch, whose houses now are enclosed by land, have pictures of their homes extending into the ravine. Fill from the Seattle Center, shortened the ravine remarkably.

The open space created lay fallow for more than thirty years, growing a huge pile of blackberries, Scotch brom, and Japanese knotweed, rusted cars and other assorted junk. The open space also grew a collection of development plans, none of which came to fruition. In the late eighties as Seattle readied to pass the 1989 open space bond fund, neighbors were anxious that a particularly large development plan would not get built on the site of one of the last open spaces on Queen Anne hill. The site was nominated for purchase with the bond funds and the commitment of a large number of wannabe community gardeners ensured that the site was earmarked for Community gardening.

Imagine a town of 35,000 people, which has almost no room for gardening. You have correctly imagined Queen Anne. When word got out that a garden would be built, people erupted from the community and in short order, cleared thirty years of collected and overgrown garbage, to build a jewel of a P-Patch hidden on the top of the hill. Although there are only about 40 gardeners at the site, it is hardly a lonely garden. Daily, during any time of the year, neighbors walk through the garden examine its delights and share with the gardeners.