Jane Sherar had a garden. It was carved from a rock ledge
overlooking the Deschutes River in Central Oregon. She and her husband ran a
hotel that at the time – the late 1800s – was the largest structure between San
Francisco and Seattle. The hotel called the Sherar House was built where a
bridge crossed the Deschutes River on the Old Dalles Military Highway. The
Dalles was a bustling town along the Columbia River at the time, and shipments
to the gold fields kept people on the road heading into Eastern Oregon.
Descendents told me about Jane's garden and I had photographs of
little bridges leading from the third story of the hotel right out to that
ledge garden high above the river in the rimrocks. In my book, I had her plant vegetables but
also a sweet grape arbor. It just seemed like the perfect place. Watering
wouldn’t have been easy with the garden high above the river, but they had
hotel employees – many employed from the nearby Indian reservation – who likely
carried heavy buckets of water across those little bridges out to the garden to
feed those thirsty plants.
Before I finished writing the book, A Sweetness to the Soul, where the garden is mentioned, I received
a phone call from a man who said as a boy he’d stayed at the Sherar House hotel
one summer. His father was an engineer and worked on the fish ladder there. The
man told me that his brother, father, mom and this now elderly man had the run
of the hotel.
“Do you remember the ledge
garden?” I asked him.
“Oh yes. I slept on the third floor and the bridge went from my
room out to that ledge where the railroad goes now.”
“I don’t suppose you’d have any idea what they planted there?”
“For certain they had sweet grapes. Some of the old vine still
stood.”
The hotel burned not long after they’d spent their summer there,
but I will always remember the delight of discovering that something I’d
written in fiction had a basis in fact… I just hadn’t known that when I wrote
it. It’s a garden to remember. Photos show the hotel, but sadly, not the garden. You can see photos of the garden at this link:
What gardens have you visited that are worth mentioning?
1 comment:
When I was growing up in Sonoma CA we would hike and ride on a ranch in the hills above Sonoma - an area with a lot of history and many local tales connected to it. There were several old cabin sites and one--all that remained was a stone foundation--sat below an impressive rock formation in a basin with a little spring, and had a garden of prickly pear cactus and, in the spring, a huge patch of daffodils. We would make a pilgrimage every spring to see the flowers and when the elderly owners of the ranch were no longer able to drive we would stop to pick them up in the jeep and bring Helen up to see the daffodils. She had grown up there, and never missed a spring visit to the old cabin site and its enduring garden.
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