Great Plant Picks originates at the Elisabeth Carey Miller Botanical Garden in Seattle, Washington, and the Miller Garden staff also take an active role in Great Plant Picks. Rick Peterson is the Great Plant Picks Manager and receives help from Greg Graves (Head Gardener, Miller Botanical Garden).
The Miller Garden was the private home and garden of Elisabeth and Pendleton Miller. The garden is known for its exceptional collection of fine trees and shrubs in addition to an expansive collection of woodland herbaceous perennials. The Millers purchased the five-acre piece of land north of the Seattle city limits on a bluff above Puget Sound in 1948. The site commands spectacular views of Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula, and the three-acre garden offers unique microclimates for growing plants.
Before she began to garden in 1948, Mrs. Miller had studied sculpture at the University of Washington and brought this artistic sensibility to her gardening style. Mrs. Miller was ahead of her time in her use of native plants, her limited use of lawn and her dislike of any gardening practices that were not environmentally friendly.
In An American Woman’s Garden, published in 1984, Elisabeth Carey Miller (1914 to 1994) described her garden as follows. It “provides a variety of exposures and horticultural conditions from woodlands to arid areas. The garden descends steeply from a wooded area to the residence and on down to the water. This factor called for the use of aged logs...and many tons of weathered granite. This material has been sited so deeply in the ground that no one is the wiser, except for the plants, which enjoy their cool root runs, friable soil and water retention on the upper sides of log or rock. The garden is informal in character and is only viewed by wandering through on paths which have been deliberately designed to arouse one’s interest in what might be around the next bend.”
She was a member of the “Rares,” an exclusive group of The Garden Club of America. She bought shares in plant hunting trips to China, getting seed from the original dawn redwoods that came to the west. She later traveled to China, making notes in her diary, and falling in love with plants from Asia. Curiously, this premier plantswoman wrote, my garden “... is sometimes erroneously referred to as a collector’s garden. This is only an incidental result rather than a deliberate design in that the so-called collections are interspersed throughout the landscape.”
Nonetheless she admitted in 1983 that her garden “features over 4,000 different plant species endemic to 35 countries from arctic to tropical regions which are tied together with extensive use of northwest natives. The garden is intensely developed and for this reason, constantly changing its appearance with year-round seasons.” The same can be said of the Miller Garden today.
In addition to developing and caring for her garden, Elisabeth Miller brought her dedication, drive and dreams to the realm of public horticulture.
She spearheaded the planting of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, the founding of the Elisabeth C. Miller Library (http://depts.washington.edu/hortlib/) at the Center for Urban Horticulture (now part of the Univeristy of Washington Botanic Gardens), and assembled the plant list for Freeway Park in downtown Seattle. She was a founding member of what is now The Northwest Horticultural Society (http://www.northwesthort.org/NHS_History.htm), the Rhododendron Species Foundation and Botanical Garden (http://www.rhodygarden.org) and many other gardening-related activities.
During her lifetime, she received many awards and medals for her advocacy of horticulture. Two of the more prestigious are the Liberty Hyde Bailey Medal, awarded to her in 1988, and the Natalie Peters Webster Medal from The Garden Club of America.
Due to her generosity and forward thinking, her spirit continues to infuse the gardening community of the Pacific Northwest, both though the Miller Garden and Great Plant Picks.
Elisabeth Carey Miller kneeling in her garden
Funded by the Pendleton and Elisabeth Carey Miller Charitable Foundation
Administered by the Elisabeth Carey Miller Botanical Garden