Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Celebrating Spring Flowers

Every flower has its day in the Pacific Northwest. Throughout the blooming season local festivals celebrate lilacs, peonies, dahlias, roses, and most other posies. The 2010 season kicks off this weekend with the Daffodil Festival in Junction City, Oregon. At the Long Tom Grange on daffodil-lined Ferguson Road, there will be homemade cinnamon buns, wagon rides, arts and crafts booths, and lots and lots of bright yellow flowers.


The next celebrated flower is the tulip with its wide array of intense colors. It is the harbinger of spring; a bright burst of color signifying the end of a long grey winter. With our cool, rainy climate, tulip growing has been an important agricultural commodity in the Pacific Northwest for many years, and the area offers a number of tulip festivals during March and April. Bloom time for tulips in this region can run from late February to late May depending on the variety, but most display their showy petals during April, peaking around the second week of the month.

Oregon’s largest display is east of Woodburn at the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm where the 25th Annual Woodburn Tulip Festival will be in full swing from March 25 through April 25. With over 40-acres of brilliant blooming flowers, the farm enjoys a splendid setting with Mt. Hood and the foothills of the Cascade Range in view on clear days. Festival visitors can tip toe through the tulip fields, order from a selection of over 150 bulbs, and buy freshly cut tulips and daffodils. A gift shop features unique Dutch items and gardening books and accessories, and there are many kid-friendly activities for tulip lovers of all ages. Weekends offer additional attractions such as wine tastings, live music, local sausages, and arts and crafts tents.

Not to be outdone, Washington State also has its share of tulip festivals with the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival, north of Seattle, drawing over one million visitors from all over the world. This event, running the entire month of April, is spread throughout Skagit County with tulip fields and farms covering a 15-mile radius. Festival events are scattered around several towns and offer something for everybody including bike and running events, street fairs, parades, art displays, quilt walks, salmon barbeques, antique markets, and wine tastings.

On a much smaller scale is the Woodland Tulip Festival, about a half hour drive north of Portland on I-5. The event takes place at the Holland America Bulb Farm owned by the Dobbe family. Benno Dobbe, along with his wife and three young children, immigrated to the United States from the Netherlands in 1980 and bought five acres of land along the Lewis River. Despite their modest beginnings, the farm now distributes millions of bulbs and cut flowers all over the world. This year’s tulip festival runs from April 3 through 30 and is similar to the event in Woodburn with tulip fields to walk through, a charming display garden with tulips and other spring-time blooms, and a gift shop offering fresh cut flowers and bulbs. On weekends, there are additional activities including live entertainment, ethnic food, crafts by local artists, and events for children.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Portland's Japanese American Historical Plaza

With Spring so early this year, it's almost time to check out one of Portland's most spectacular floral displays....the 100 blooming, Akebono cherry trees lining the north end of the Tom McCall Waterfront Park. Their beautiful double pink blossoms form a brilliant floral canopy, and are a welcome harbinger of spring, marking the end of a long, gray winter.
 The trees, planted in two parallel rows, were a gift to the city from the Japanese Grain Importers Association and decorate the waterfront side of the Japanese American Historical Plaza.


Dedicated in August, 1990, to the memory of Japanese Americans deported to internment camps during World War II, the Plaza extends along the Willamette River and Naito Parkway between the Burnside and Steel Bridges. This award-winning park was designed by landscape architect Robert Murase, himself an internee at age four. It was the first memorial to the Japanese interment in the country and was funded and promoted by the efforts of the Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Portland businessman and real estate developer, Bill Naito.

The main entrance from Couch Street is framed by two large copper columns, each depicting carved images of the Japanese American history in the Northwest. The one on the left shows an elderly man holding a child; the right one features children on a train to an internment camp and a mother and child guarded by a camp sentry.

Beyond the columns, a collection of large boulders follows a serpentine line next to the river walkway and cherry trees. The stones are carved with poems written by Lawson Inada, a professor of English at Southern Oregon University, and touchingly tell the story of local Japanese Americans. Some of the stones are broken, some shattered to represent the disrupted lives of internees. One large boulder lists the names of the different internment camps and another one displays a plaque with the Bill of Rights, an ironic reminder of the laws designed to protect the rights of all citizens. Not far away, is a plaque with a copy of the official Congressional apology to each of the 60,000 surviving Japanese American internees signed by President Reagan in 1987. At the far end of the Plaza, near the foot of the Steel Bridge is the Friendship Circle. Two tall stainless steel columns soar from a circular garden, celebrating the Portland and Sapporo, Japan, sister city relationship.

West of the Plaza is the neighborhood known today as Old Town, but it was once the center of a thriving Japanese American community called Nihonmachi, or Japantown. At the end of the 19th century, large numbers of Japanese workers immigrated to the Pacific Northwest to work in farms, orchards, salmon canneries, and railroads. By 1905, more than 25,000 called Portland home. A bustling, business community developed in this area with its own newspaper, grocery stores, theaters, shops and restaurants.

All that came to an end on February 19, 1942 when President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 directing the military to incarcerate all persons of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast. Portland families were sent to what had been the Pacific International Livestock Expo Center and from there to various relocation camps scattered throughout remote, rural areas of Idaho, Wyoming, and California. Japantown never recovered, and as one of the poems engraved on a stone in the Plaza reflects: Just over there was our community. Echoes! Echoes! Echoes!

Today, the history of the local Japanese American community is told at the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center located at 121 NW Second Avenue, between Couch and Davis Streets in the old Merchant Hotel. Its exhibits, artifacts, and photos highlight the experiences of first generation immigrants called Issei, the development of Japantown, and the forced internment during World War II.