Someone stole plants and damaged another Oct. 1
Gerlinde Smith, designer of Talent’s tiny park, shows Thursday where vandals removed plants. [Jamie Lusch / Mail Tribune]
Talent’s tiny jewel — dubbed the most minuscule park in the world at 374 square inches — was vandalized Oct. 1.
The culprit struck in broad daylight, stealing three of the five plants in the tiny garden, and lopping the branches off a fourth, according to a post on the Talent Garden Club’s Facebook page.
One of the park’s creators rode his bike past the park at 10 in the morning, and all was well, said Gerlinde Smith, chair of the Talent Bee City Committee and designer of the park.
“I was there at 2 in the afternoon. I go there every day to meditate, and I saw the plants were gone,” Smith said.
The plants had been dug out and the area around them smoothed out afterward, she said. The violation of the park’s intentions, and of nature itself, drove her away without meditating. Once she got home, she vented her grief by sobbing, she said.
“It has just touched the community very deeply,” she said. “We have had our collective grief, for sure. Some people are very angry. I don’t get angry; I only get a little melancholy.”
Three of the plants stolen, Lewisia, yellow-eyed grass and pussytoes, are rare native plants. They were dug out while the plant at the center of the little park, an unusual dwarf variety of mock orange (called ‘Illuminati Tower’), was stripped of its branches.
The sliced away branches could be used to propagate more of the plants, Smith said. The others were dug up as if the thief planned to replant them somewhere else.
“You know, I thought about art, how sometimes people see a piece of art and they decide rain, hail or shine they’re going to get it, even if they have to engage someone to steal it from a museum or something like that. And maybe this isn’t quite on that level, but it could be something like that, with plants of this caliber,” she said.
Her melancholy took a few days to pass, but now she has turned her attention to the future of the tiniest park in the world.
“I’ve just arrived back from Williams, where I picked up a replacement plant for the mock orange,” she said. “The people at Forestfarm Nursery are so sweet. The manager, his name is Greg, he said, ‘Don’t you charge her for the mock orange.’”
The pussytoes will come from her own garden. She can divide and propagate a new plant from one of her own. Shooting Star Nursery had a Lewisia plant. The yellow-eyed-grass could not be found as a plant start, so she ordered seed and will try to propagate it herself.
Despite being native to the area, the plants are rare because they are hard to grow and are not found everywhere. The pussytoes are found only in craggy, rocky places at a little higher elevation.
In nature, the plants can make many seeds, which germinate slowly in cool soil through fall and winter, a process called “cold stratification.” Many of the seeds won’t sprout at all, making them difficult for gardeners to grow.
“The yellow-eyed grass is tough to propagate, but I have some experience with tough plants, so I don’t shy away,” she said.
The plants will not be replaced until a security camera is installed, Smith said.
The timeline is not known yet, but Smith was confident that Talent Mayor Darby Ayers-Flood and Public Works Director Bret Marshall are dedicated to restoring the tiny park as soon as possible.
Ayers-Flood referred to the theft as “a senseless violation.”
“It is particularly hard to understand when someone stomps on a delightful offering for the whole community. We are fortunate to have people like Gerlinde Smith, who loves Talent so much she is willing to try again,” Ayers-Flood said.
“Sooner or later it always comes back to whoever committed any kind of misdeed,” Smith said. “I don’t think people ever get away with that.”
Blue Heron Park in Phoenix, which was restored last year after being destroyed by the Almeda Fire, had Lewisia plants stolen too, said Smith, who also helped design that park.
Talent’s newest park was inspired by Portland’s tiny park, which held the title of “tiniest park” through the “Guinness Book of World Records“ since the 1970s. Ayers-Flood approached the Talent Bee City Committee last year and asked whether a tinier park was possible.
The park is a hexagon, inspired by the shape of honeycombs in beehives, and all the plants inside were carefully chosen to feed and attract pollinators. Talent was the second Bee City in the United States, a distinction available to cities devoted to conserving shrinking pollinator species.
Reach Mail Tribune reporter Morgan Rothborne at mrothborne@rosebudmedia.com or 541-776-4487. Follow her on Twitter @MRothborne.