Features
As of 2005, the Oregon Garden includes more than twenty specialty gardens and features such as the Bosque, Children's Garden, Conifer Garden (one of the largest collections of dwarf and miniature conifers in the United States), Honor Garden, Hughes Water Garden, Jackson & Perkins Rose Garden, Lewis & Clark Garden, Northwest Garden, Pet Friendly Garden, and Sensory Garden. The water garden is a maze-like area with numerous paths and bridges. A 25-acre (100,000 m2) native Oregon white oak grove includes the 400-year-old, 100-foot (30 m) Signature Oak, which is one of Oregon's Heritage Trees. The garden holds an annual festival each autumn. Also on the grounds is the Teufel Amphitheater which hosts concerts and other events; Sam Bush played in the Amphitheater in 2006.
Gordon House, the only house Frank Lloyd Wright designed in Oregon, is now on the grounds of Oregon Garden. The house, designed in 1957, is one of Wright's Usonian houses, and the only Wright house open to the public in the Pacific Northwest. Completed in 1964, the home was moved from Wilsonville, Oregon, to the garden in 2001.
On each Earth Day since 1999, the Garden hosts a celebration which attracts environmental supporters and organizations with demonstrations, exhibitions, and workshops. Garden admission is free for this event.
Using treated wastewater from the city, the garden is one of only a few installations in the United States that reuses wastewater for a water feature. Even in the summer months, the garden does not draw on drinking water supplies, instead relying entirely on wastewater treatment plant effluent, which additionally irrigates 240 acres (0.97 km2) of farmland. Until recently, such use was prohibited by state law, but the law was revised partly due to this water reclamation project. The garden also provides wetland mitigation for a nearby industrial park to provide waterfowl and amphibian habitat, and offloads Silver Creek from water it would not naturally carry during low-flow months in the summer to address an Oregon Department of Environmental Quality requirement. The wastewater receives final treatment on about 16 acres (65,000 m2) of the Oregon Garden where a series of 25 ponds perform three final filtering functions. The end result is extremely high quality treated water.
Read more about this topic: Oregon Garden
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“These, then, will be some of the features of democracy ... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, particolored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)