Willamette Valley and Oregon Coast Excursion
Sunday – Tuesday, May 8-10, 2022
Following the Closing conference session on Sunday morning, May 8, a motor coach will depart at 1:00 pm from the Heathman Lodge and head south into the Willamette Valley for an three-day/two-night expedition visiting key gardens and sightseeing destinations. Your tour package will include all costs, including hotels, and will be itemized as a paid option when you register. A “Single Supplement” will be required for those not sharing a room.
Please note: There will be a minimum number of registrations for the tour to be implemented. We will keep you apprised of the progress in bookings. The current tally is always available at the bottom of the Registration Page.
This tour will include the following:
Deerly Missed
Deerly Missed is the seven-acre home and garden of Pat and Dave Eckerdt. A two-acre ‘collector’s garden’ of unusual and interesting specimens in many genera surrounds a home originally built in 1893. The garden is now over thirty years old and, like your own, is ever changing. There are significant collections of conifer, epimedium, clematis, and rhododendron. Most of the plants are labeled. Pat and Dave invite you to come and make friends with some plants you may not have met before. Art and garden structures are tastefully incorporated into the garden. The terrain is flat ground with easily accessible pathways. You can view images of the garden HERE.
Hendricks Park
Making our way from Salem to Eugene, we arrive at Hendricks Park, Eugene’s oldest city park. Its 80 acres includes a world-renowned, 11-acre rhododendron garden started in 1951 with the assistance of the Eugene Chapter of the American Rhododendron Society. It exists under a canopy of oaks and fir trees and includes a wide diversity of ornamental trees and Magnolias. As a collaborative effort between Park Staff, The Friends of Hendricks Park, The ARS Eugene Chapter, and the Tuesday morning volunteers, the expansion and first installation of plants were recently installed in the newly designated Harold Greer Bed. A commemorative plaque will be added this summer to signify the collection of Greer hybrids. The bed is in the style of several throughout the park designed to honor founding members of the ARS Eugene Chapter and for Northwest rhododendron pioneers, such as James Barto and Del & Ray James.
The group will then depart for a short reception, hosted by Nancy Greer, at the Springs at Greer Gardens.
The Springs at Greer Gardens
Although missing Harold, you will enjoy a brief reception at The Springs at Greer Gardens, hosted by Nancy Greer, and a buffet dinner to follow in the Sisters Dining Room in the Springs’ main building. We’ll have breakfast here again on Monday morning, before heading out to the coast for Hinsdale Garden.
The Greers had been involved in rhododendrons for more than 60 years. Greer Gardens started as a hobby of Harold Greer’s father, Edgar, whose death in 1972 was the impetus for Harold to make a business of a hobby. The Garden grew into an internationally known mail-order nursery, with up to 40 employees shipping plants worldwide on an eventual 14 acres (5.7 ha). The property recently transitioned into a premier senior retirement complex—The Springs at Greer Gardens—which housed a new residence for Harold and Nancy and an adjacent rhododendron garden of Harold’s treasured specimens.
In 1989, Harold Greer was the youngest person ever to receive an ARS Gold Medal and the youngest to serve as president of the Society. He was the organizing founder of the Western Regional Conferences some 39 years ago and was co-chairing the 2022 convention with Mike Stewart. Harold’s photos have been published widely, including on the cover of Smithsonian Magazine. The combination of his extensive knowledge and his warm and engaging style had made him the perfect host for our first evening’s dinner event. The unexpected and tragic loss of Harold Greer occurred on the evening of August 10th at his home. He was 76. (See The Springs Living on our Sponsors page.)
Valley River Inn
From Greer Gardens, we’ll make the short trip to our nearby overnight accommodations in Eugene at the Valley River Inn . Valley River Inn brings the best of Eugene, Oregon to your doorstep. A perfect destination for your unforgettable experiences in Eugene, including meetings, weddings, and social events. Offering ample parking, easy access to the highway, the University of Oregon, and Downtown Eugene.
Monday, May 9, 2022
We’ll check out of the Valley River Inn and head back to the Springs at Greer Gardens to meet Nancy Greer for a buffet breakfast there. Then we’ll head west to Reedsport, Oregon, to visit:
Hinsdale Garden & Dean Creek Elk Viewing Area
In 1912, Oscar B. Hinsdale, founder of the Umpqua River Navigation Co. and a manager of the Gardiner Mill Co., constructed a three-room house on what would become known as Spruce Reach Island, according to documents provided by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). In the late 1940s, his son O. Howard Hinsdale, a bank president and serious botany hobbyist, improved the island with 23,000 cubic yards (17, 585 cubic meters) of fill and decorated it with an array of flora imported from around the world. His impressive collection at Hinsdale Garden grew to include 500 rhododendrons, 300 azaleas, 50 camellias and close to 100 imported trees.
O. Howard Hinsdale expanded his parents’ once-modest home into a 5,500 square foot (510 m2) lodge, which had to be raised—not once, but three times—to prevent it from being flooded by the river. Hinsdale’s son, Howard Jr., was the last of the family to live in the house.
The garden was well on its way to being lost were it not for the intervention and advocacy of ARS members. In recent years, the BLM has partnered with the American Rhododendron Society to maintain it. The Oregon Chapters (District 4, ARS) continue to actively participate in the ongoing renovation and maintenance of Hinsdale garden pursuant to a written Memorandum of Understanding with the BLM.
For a “taste” of what’s in store for your visit to the Hinsdale Garden, click on this YouTube link for an interactive 360o image when you move your cursor through the scene.
The Prchal Garden
Ron and Chery Prchal have created an extensive woodland garden over the past 20 years. They feature over 450 rhododendrons and azaleas, specializing in species and dwarfs. Their garden also contains many maples, heathers, hellebores, hostas, and other blooming plants. Tucked away in the garden are many woodcarvings, benches and other garden art. Their property is often referred to as a park with its 150’ (46 m) tall cedars, hemlocks and spruce trees dominating the landscape.
ICM Restaurant
In Old Town Florence, overlooking the Siuslaw River, the International C-Food Market Restaurant, referred to as ICM, was built by Owner Ed Millerstrom with the help of many talented local people. ICM is considered the newest and most exciting seafood restaurant on the Oregon Coast. Famous for its “All you can eat Dungeness Crab” ICM Restaurant won “First Place” in the People’s Choice Chowder Contest at the “Chowder Blues & Brews” festival in Florence in October, 2011. Now it’s on to our first stop for the afternoon:
Chris Trautmann’s Mowbray Gardens
First established in 1976 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Mowbray Gardens has always been an arboretum dedicated to the furthering of rhododendrons and conifers. Now living in Florence, OR, Chris strives to display and produce the finest rhododendron flowers hybridizers can achieve, while offering other plant material for sale. Here you’ll see the latest and greatest in break-through colors along with the many witches’ brooms of pine, spruce and true fir—ranging from squat balls of foliage to golden conifers that blaze in color.
Darlingtonia Wayside
Darlingtonia State Natural Site is the only Oregon state park property dedicated to the protection of a single plant species, Darlingtonia californica, a carnivorous plant and sole member of the genus Darlingtonia in the family Sarraceniaceae and the only member of the pitcher plant family in Oregon. This 18-acre (7.3 ha) botanical park has a boardwalk out into a fen that is home to the species
Darlingtonia californica, also called the Cobra Lily, blooms in the spring and has flowers with five purple petals surrounded by yellow sepals. Darlingtonia are found in serpentine soils and sphagnum fens arising from wet sands on coastal plains. Nearby scenery offers a lush assortment of vegetation, including rhododendron, spruce, cedar and shore pine. Note: Collecting Darlingtonia is illegal in Oregon.
Sea Lion Caves
Established in 1932, Sea Lion Caves is a privately-owned wildlife preserve and bird sanctuary—part of the Oregon/Cape Perpetua Marine Reserve—located 11 miles (17.7 km) north of Florence, OR. This is America’s largest sea cave and a year-round home of the Steller sea lion (Eumetopias jubatus). Winter months find hundreds of sea lions in the cave and during the spring breeding and birthing time, the sea lions move from the cave to the rookery (rock ledges in front of the cave), where they remain through the summer.
Best Western Agate Beach Inn
Following a full day of garden visits and coastal scenery, we’ll pull into the Best Western in Newport, Oregon, to relax, enjoy dinner in the Starfish Room and spend the night at the Best Western Agate Beach Inn, the site of several previous Fall Western Regional ARS conferences. Here you can unwind, stroll the beach, take in the view from high above the dunes on the shore, or lounge around the fire pit.
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
Connie Hansen Garden Conservancy
Fresh from breakfast at the Agate Beach Inn, we continue north to Lincoln City, OR.
Free to the public every day of the year, the Connie Hansen Garden Conservancy is all about appreciating the simple beauty of flowers. It’s also a rhododendron lover’s dream, as the woman for whom the garden is named had quite an affinity for them. You will enjoy this video introduction and this recorded feature from Portland’s Garden Time TV.
Now we head to a most unique tour destination:
Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum
First envisioned by Michael King Smith, a former captain in the US Air Force and son of Evergreen International Aviation founder Delford Smith, the Evergreen Museum opened in 1991 with a small collection of vintage aircraft in a hangar at company headquarters outside McMinnville. Its claim to fame is housing the legendary “Spruce Goose”—the Hughes H-4 Hercules, a prototype strategic airlift flying boat designed and built by the Hughes Aircraft Company.
While the plane was intended as a transatlantic flight transport for use during World War II, it was not completed in time to be used in the war. The aircraft made only one brief flight on November 2, 1947, and the project never advanced beyond the single example produced. Built from wood because of wartime restrictions on the use of aluminum and concerns about weight, the aircraft was nicknamed the Spruce Goose by critics, although it was made almost entirely of birch. The Hercules is the largest flying boat ever built, and it had the largest wingspan of any aircraft that had ever flown, until the Scaled Composites Stratolaunch first flew on April 13, 2019.
In March 1990, the Walt Disney Company announced that it would close the Long Beach, California, exhibit of the Spruce Goose. The Aeroclub of Southern California began looking for a new home for the historic aircraft. In 1992, the Evergreen Museum won the bid with a proposal to build a museum around the aircraft and feature it as a central exhibit.
The disassembly of the aircraft began in August 1992. The parts were sent by ship up the Pacific Ocean, Columbia River, and Willamette River to Dayton where it was transferred to trucks and driven to Evergreen International Aviation. It arrived in February 1993. For the next eight years, the plane went through detailed restoration. Volunteers removed all the paint, replaced worn parts, and repainted the entire aircraft, among many other tasks. In September 2000, the main aircraft assemblies were complete. The fuselage, wings, and tail were transported across the highway and into the new museum building, still under construction. Over the next year, crews assembled the wings and tail to the fuselage. These were completed in time for the museum’s opening on June 6, 2001. The control surfaces (flaps, ailerons, rudder, and elevators) were assembled later. The last piece was put into place on December 7, 2001.
In September 2006, work began on the space museum building, a twin to the aviation museum. The new building was completed in May 2008 and had its grand opening in June of 2008.
Now we head to our last stop of the day to take in the vast gardens of:
Monrovia
Located in Dayton, OR, in the Willamette Valley, Monrovia is a 550-acre (222 ha.) nursery dedicated to growing conifers, maples, broadleaf shrubs and other cold-hardy plants. Dayton is only one of Monrovia’s five growing locations, along with Cairo, Georgia (240 acres, 97 ha.), Granby, Connecticut (160 acres, 65 ha.), Visalia, California (600 acres, 243 ha.), and Azusa, California (home office).
Monrovia partners with leading breeders and plant explorers throughout the world, e.g., Dan Hinkley, to evaluate the potential of new plants for gardeners, as well as watching for new cultivars, and then bringing these unique plants to market. Monrovia prides itself on its propagation and growing techniques, its exclusive custom soil mixes (79 of them), and the care it takes to assure plants thrive once planted in the landscape.
We now board our motor coach for one last time and head back to the Heathman Lodge for a final night of rest before seeing our rhododendron friends off to their own gardens around the world.
Estimated schedule:
