If the older trees around Bellingham could talk, chances are they’d still be gossiping about John Bennet.
Horticulturist, florist, nurseryman and world traveler all have been used to describe him but no title can quite encapsulate the enigmatic and slightly mystic aura that surrounds this 19th-century Whatcom County pioneer.
Despite appearing to most a simple gardener, Bennet was a shrewd plant breeder and an unfailing civic advocate. He had a profound impact on budding Whatcom County, pioneering the very first agricultural fair in the area (now known as the Northwest Washington Fair), serving on the county’s first horticultural society and even championing for Bellingham’s first city cemetery.
His garden gave Bellingham many of the exotic trees and shrubs seen around town today, from beautiful fruit trees to the invasive, allergy-causing Scotch broom.
Tim Wahl, a local historian, was raised around what used to be Bennet’s property.
“As a kid I grew up right there and would cruise all over the neighborhood,” Wahl said. “Around his place had all these interesting trees early on that were nowhere else … it was the only place the sycamore maples lived.”
As Bennet never claimed much fame or glory outside of Bellingham, many of the details of his life have been lost to time. Cascadia Daily News compiled information from multiple books including “The Fourth Corner,” “History of Whatcom County” and “Settlers, Structures & Ships on Bellingham Bay, 1852-1889,” as well as newspaper articles, photos and local historians to piece together the story of Bennet’s life.
Bennet leaves vibrant mark on Whatcom County
Bennet was born in 1818 in Cathcart, a small village outside Glasgow, Scotland.
His education (not a common thing in those days) and a passion for botany and geology drove him to travel the world as a young man. He carried with him to various continents a large chest, filled not with money or clothes but with plants: bulbs, cuttings and seeds carefully collected from each of the places he visited.
Eventually, Bennet immigrated to the U.S. and was drawn to the West by the promise of gold, first in California then north to the Fraser River. He struck out as a gold miner but ended up discovering something even more valuable in a small pioneer town on the bay in Whatcom County: a place to grow his garden.
After working a few years in the Sehome coal mines, Bennet saved up enough money to purchase the Compton land claim in 1860. The 10-acre tract, which is now occupied by the Heidelberg Materials cement plant, was next door to the home of Edward Eldridge, the famous Bellingham judge and namesake of Eldridge Avenue. It was here that Bennet would start his life’s work: growing, propagating and breeding plants.
Within a few years, Bennet had lovingly turned the Compton claim into a vast garden and orchard, blooming with the countless varieties of flowers, trees and shrubs he had collected in his massive trunk, along with some native plants. It’s hard to imagine just how striking the Bennet property must have been, since at that time early Bellingham was by and large a bleak, muddy wasteland of recently logged forest.
A letter written by C. I. Roth, a young girl in Bennet’s time, and later published in “History of Whatcom County” by Lottie Roeder Roth describes a walk in Bennet’s garden:
“I can smell the mint now as it grew under those stairs and gave off its odor as we brushed against it. Honeysuckles and sweet briar covered the cottage by the stairs, lilacs, snowballs, flowering almond, laburnum, hollyhocks … and many others rare and unfamiliar to people of today — there we learned how to plant and care for all.”
To people in Bellingham, the garden was a place of gathering, beauty and quiet. Numerous events were held there, including a picnic to celebrate the very first summiting of Mount Baker by settlers.
To those who knew him, Bennet was not the textbook rugged pioneer man. He wore a broad visored cap, which covered curls of reddish-brown hair, along with gunny sacks tied around his knees for the work he did tending his many plants. He was known for picking a beautiful bouquet of flowers for his visitors, no matter their age or social standing, and for being fiercely devoted to his plants. One story told by his niece, who stayed with Bennet in his older days, recounts him weeping after a visitor broke the stem of a tree he received from a friend.
Roth describes him as quiet and kind, with a Scotch burr underlying a soft, melodic voice. “I have never heard a voice like Mr. [sic] Bennett’s beautiful Scotch accent. It haunts me still like some beautiful melody.”
Bennet’s specialty was breeding fruit trees adapted to Western Washington soils and climate, including several varieties of apple, plum and pear. This talent is what earned him the title “The Burbank of Puget Sound,” after the famous California plant breeder, Luther Burbank, even though Bennet never gained as much fame. His various fruits, flowers and forage grasses were propagated and distributed around the West Coast, however, and even earned a congratulatory letter from an agricultural commissioner in Washington, D.C.
After Bennet died in 1901, much of the pioneer gardener’s physical legacy was lost to progress. Most of his sprawling garden and orchard was cleared to build the Olympic Portland Cement Company (today the site of Heidelberg Materials and GeoTest Services). Bennett Drive on the north side of town was originally named for the beloved gardener, but the spelling was eventually corrupted to add the extra “t” (reflecting the English rather than Scottish spelling). Finally, a school was built in 1907 in his honor but was demolished shortly afterward in 1929.
Fittingly, Bennet’s memory lives on most strongly not in buildings, but in the many plants he brought to the area and propagated. To this day, a few gnarled apple trees still cling to life at the cement plant where his orchard used to stand, along with two giant Sequoia trees facing the bay that Bennet planted in 1872. They once reportedly reached more than 100 feet tall but now stand at 75 and 77 feet, their tops having been lost to a storm years ago.
Bennet also helped plant several orchards around Bellingham, including the namesake of the current Orchard Terrace Condominiums on Forest Street. Several of the now heavily-pruned apple and pear trees still dutifully line residents’ courtyards with fruit each autumn. His nursery stock found its way throughout Washington and Oregon, and while it may be impossible to know for sure, it’s likely many old fruit trees around Western Washington started their lives in Bennet’s garden.
Not all of Bennet’s legacy is sweet, however. Included in the list of exotic plants he introduced to Western Washington are several invasive species, most notably English holly and Scotch broom. While highly valued at the time for their ornamental value (consider that in the 1930s, Washington nearly became the Holly State), these plants soon escaped cultivation and became a nuisance.
Still, the knowledge he passed on and love of growing things he instilled inspired many of the beautiful gardens around Bellingham. Perhaps more importantly, he planted the idea that Whatcom County’s soil and climate would be a more lasting source of wealth than the boom-bust salmon and logging economies.
Yet those who knew him would be satisfied to remember the kind gardener as he lived: smiling quietly among his plants, and looking contentedly out over Bellingham Bay.
Not a bad way to live, Bennet.
Ben Long is an environmental/science reporter, placed at CDN through the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mass Media Fellowship. Reach him at benlong@cascadiadaily.com.
