Tom McCall Waterfront Park, Portland

October 28, 2025

The Garden House (Devon, England)

The destinations are beginning to blur but looking at the tour guide booklet, I see that we are now in Plymouth. Today, we visited two gardens designed by Keith Wiley. The first is The Garden House , where Wiley worked as Head Gardener for 25 years (from 1978-2003). The 10-acre estate was purchased in the 1940s by former Eton schoolmaster Lionel Fortescue and his wife Katherine. It was formerly home to the vicars of Buckland Monachronum. The Fortescue's renovated the gardens and ran a market garden business and raised cattle. The remains of some of the original buildings in the vicarage still stand in the garden and serve as a romantic backdrop in the Walled Garden - I loved the way they had massed ferns together. Just stunning! Surrounding the walled garden and venturing out away from the house are more naturalistic plantings - Today, the head gardener is Nick Haworth, who was previously head gardener at Greenway , which we visited earlier. Keith Wiley lef...

Tom McCall Waterfront Park, Portland, Oregon

The Tom McCall Waterfront Park (named for a former Oregon governor), stretches along the western side of the Willamette River. At the southern tip is a harbor, restaurants (we ate at a good seafood restaurant here) and an amazing garden filled with ornamental grasses and other plants. This is where these photographs were taken.

If you head north, you approach a walking area (you can see it in the bottom photograph, next to the seafood restaurant), that extends all the way up to Naito Parkway and the downtown area where our condo was located. This area is popular with joggers, bikers, people walking their pets, etc. The space was once a freeway. It was torn down in 1975 and this park was created. It opened to the public in 1978.