In the late winter of 2025, the Rotary Club of Bainbridge Island awarded the Port Gamble S’Klallam Foundation a $6,300 grant to help outfit the new greenhouse with much needed supplies and equipment – the last step in becoming operational. The grant helped pay for the work benches, the propagation misting station, and a cedar shed to store tools and materials safely away from the public. Since those purchases, Heronswood staff have begun propagating clones of rare plants found in the garden to ensure their survival as well as other plants to sell or plant in one of the many beds on the property. The benches were most recently utilized to assist with potting up this year’s batch of Amaryllis bulbs gifted annually during the holiday season to all tribal elders to help brighten their celebrations. Both the Foundation and Heronswood staff are grateful to the BI Rotary Club for getting us across the finish line with the large, multi-year fundraising effort to get a new, four-season functional greenhouse ready to produce the future sprouts at Heronswood Garden.
Plants are not the only thing sprouting in the greenhouse now. As pictured up top, the garden’s Assistant Director Riz Reyes teaches a group of Port Gamble S’Klallam Early Childhood Education students about the wonders of horticulture. The new greenhouse serves doubly as a space to ensure and expand the future plants of Heronswood while also laying down the soil and seed in the mind of the next generation of tribal horticulturalists. Thank you Rotary Club of Bainbridge Island!
