Save Heronswood

NY Times article this morning.  Long story short:  Burpee is selling Dan Hinkley’s gem of a nursery north of Seattle.  It will only set you back $9 million.  The Pacific Northwest Horticultural Conservancy is trying to raise money to buy it.

If you haven’t followed the Heronswood story, it’s caused a bit of controversy.  Key quote from the article:

At Christmas, Burpee landed on The Seattle Times’s “naughty” list along with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il.

Many gardeners feel the same way.

Update 3//9/07:  Garden Rant posting where in the comment thread I speculate about the value of the business as opposed to just the property.

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3 thoughts on “Save Heronswood”

  1. I understand that the horitculture business is… still a business. But I haven’t been able to buy anything, even a packet of seeds, from Burpee since. And when Mr. Ball sent out a notice in one of his recent emails about how “we” built up Heronswood, etc., I finally did what I’d been wanting to do for a while and unsubscribed from his newsletters, too.

  2. You know I feel. I’ve rated over at GardenRant. But I feel I should point out one small little error in your post above:

    You wrote: “long story short: Burpee is selling Dan Hinkley’s gem of a nursery north of Seattle.”

    This not true.

    Burpee is selling IT’S gem of a nurery. Dan Hinkley sold it to Burpee. For money. Voluntarily. Under no duress. For profit. It isn’t Dan Hinkley’s gem of a nursery any more.

    A small thing.

  3. Not a small thing Clerk. You are 100 percent correct. I’ll beg forgiveness because I posted before 6 am and before the coffee kicked in.

    I should have said something to the effect of ‘the nursery north of Seattle that Hinkley ran for xx years before Burpee purchased the business in 200x.’

    That’s the difference between journalists and bloggers. Sometimes we don’t say exactly what we mean, and a good editor — someone like you — would have caught it before it went into print.

    Thanks for the good catch.

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