After two decades, Bainbridge in Bloom reigns as one of the
Northwest’s premier garden tours, boasting high-profile speakers,
internationally celebrated landscapes and bus loads of
green-thumbed gawkers.
“It’s the grand lady of garden tours,” said gardening guru
Ciscoe Morris, who will lead one of the tour’s workshops this
weekend.
But the two-day event’s origins came out of the not-so-grand
financial troubles of an island nonprofit group.
“We were just sitting around a living room trying to come up
with ideas for a source of income to keep our organization going,”
said Janice Shaw, one of the early board members of the Bainbridge
Island Arts and Humanities Council.
Several ideas were bandied about, but board member Joanna
Newnham’s spur-of-the-moment notion for a garden tour stilled the
brainstorming session.
“It was an ‘a-ha’ moment,” Shaw said. “We said ‘that’s it’ and
everything just started clicking. We cranked the tour out in a
short amount of time.”
Hoping for at least $5,000, members were stunned when the 1988
tour of six island gardens generated $11,000.
“It was extremely successful and exceeded expectations,” Shaw
said. “We knew we had a winner.”
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