Master gardeners beautify Vancouver’s ‘Welcome to Washington’ display

Twenty volunteers with the Master Gardener Foundation of Clark County, their orange safety vests as bright as the trays of begonias lined up on the grass, spent Saturday morning transforming a blank brown canvas beside Interstate 5 into a festive flower bed featuring a red apple complete with leaf and wooden stem.

Their canvas was the patch of ground framed by boxwoods in the shape of the state of Washington that graces the median just south of the iconic Welcome to Washington sign at the Interstate 5-Highway 500 exit ramp.

The organization’s members came up with the design, grew the 2,500 plants for the display and did the digging and planting for the second year in a row. The Washington Department of Transportation, which maintains the grassy median, paid $2,500 for the plants and contributed eight cubic yards of rich brown topsoil.

Volunteers planted trays and trays of white wave petunias and white alyssum as a backdrop, then filled in the shape of a giant apple with bronze-leaf red and pink begonias outlined in brilliant red salvia blooms. The leaf is composed of thyme and parsley.

“We’re here because we’re master gardeners, and we like to plant and work in the dirt,” said Sandy Burckhard, who supervised the work along with Nancy Funk of the foundation. “People as they come into the state will be able to see this beautiful sign.”

The apple, designated the official state fruit in 1989, was a fitting choice. Washington produces about 42 percent of the apples grown in the U.S., though not many of them come from Clark County.

Biodegradable sheets of paper were laid down to control weeds, and volunteers used trowels to punch holes through the paper and dig holes for the sturdy flowers. Things moved along smoothly under the capable supervision of Funk and Burckhard.

A few volunteers wanted to know how close together they should plant the petunias. The answer came: About 12 inches apart. “Not so much” fertilizer, one was admonished.

Funk said the flowers are likely to boom well into the fall, watered by a WSDOT sprinkler system.

Bill Joye, an engineer married to master gardener MaryAnn Joye, came up with the idea for building a curving apple stem with cedar boards. It juts from the ground at the top center of the flower bed. “He wanted it to twist around like a natural stem,” his wife said.

This is the third year in a row that bedding plants have been used to adorn the official welcome to the Evergreen State. A two-year experiment with using native plants fell victim to an unknown critic with a weed-whacker in 2009. Two dozen volunteers stepped in that year and filled the bed with hundreds of geraniums and petunias.

The Welcome to Washington sign and the flower bed were installed beside the freeway about a dozen years ago. A state transportation employee coordinated the annual planting for years, but after she retired the effort languished, and the agency started getting complaints about the condition of the sign. Two volunteers, Heidi Palena and Yvette Golemo, stepped up and worked with Bill VanAntwerp, a WSDOT roadside maintenance supervisor, to spruce up the sign and the area around it in 2009.

Last year, the Master Gardener Foundation took over the project. The nonprofit organization provides grant funds and support for nearly a dozen community projects, including the Fort Vancouver Historical Garden and local food banks and pantries.

On Saturday, as the sun broke through the clouds, VanAntwerp was shoveling and digging along with the gardeners. He didn’t mind, he said.

“I’d be doing the same thing at home.”

Kathie Durbin: 360-735-4512 or kathie.durbin@columbian.com.