Al Philips’ Native Plant Garden
“I cannot describe with words the emotions that consume me when I see these things.”
Al Philips gestured around from where he sat on a striped chair cushion on the top of a stack of dimensional maple boards covered with a brown tarp, hugging one knee crossed over the other with clasped hands, eyes closed, head tilted skyward.
A brief article in the Bainbridge Island Review from a year ago alerted me to the existence of Dolphin Place Open Space, Philips’ two-acre property on Little Manzanita Bay on the western shore of Bainbridge Island, Washington, where for the last fifty years he has amassed a collection of over 160 native tree and plant species. His monthly tours had filled by the time I looked further into it, so this year I booked early.
Alex and I arrived a few minutes late for our tour on the morning of Sunday, May 19th.
“It’s just the two of you!” Philips said, congenially, as we shook hands. He’d directed us to enter his property under a heavy timber gate and through a massive hollowed-out and roofed cedar trunk, within which hung half of a carved and painted cedar mask.
“There was a Suquamish fishing village here on Little Manzanita Bay,” Philips told us by way of explanation. “Where the Olsen Farm is today, just at the back of this inlet, was the village. They called this place Ratfish Bay in the Native language. I found the mask half submerged and rotting into the soil years ago.” Philips’ land acknowledgement was touching in its informality. He started his story at the beginning, not his beginning here, and there was nothing performative about it.
He handed us each an outdoor chair cushion and motioned for us to sit down on a mossy log. He informed us he’d be having knee replacement surgery in a few days, and he’d start the tour seated – if we didn’t mind – while he gave us some background information.
“When I was a young man, my uncle sent me on a years-long all expenses paid tour of Southeast Asia,” Philips began. “My Uncle Sam,” he clarified, in case we’d missed the inference. “I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t whore, and at the end of my tour I had $8,000. I began looking for a piece of land on the water with the biggest trees I could find.”
Philips bought his two acre property with the money he’d saved while serving in Vietnam. “I wanted to farm,” he continued. “But I didn’t want to farm vegetables, I wanted to farm oxygen!”
He’s a storyteller, we could tell just a few lines in, and he’d told this story before. Dolphin Place Open Space is open for plant tours a couple Sundays each month in the warm late spring through early autumn. After giving us a snapshot of his eclectic career – the Senior Construction Officer for the Navy submarine USS Alaska; selected by the Navy to train as an astronaut (though not selected by NASA, in the end); an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering; a masters degree in physics; a prolific glass artist; an aerospace engineer; a contractor with NASA – he refocused on the native plants we’d come to tour.
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“Enough about me, let’s talk about you!” he said. He opened his eyes – they’d been closed the entire time he recited his story – and looked at us. “You love native plants, yes?”
“Yes!” we replied, eagerly.
“Do you know much about them? How much do you love them?”
“A fair bit!” I replied. “I have an environmental education background and I have a lot of interest and a good start on keeping a native garden at our home.”
“Great! Let’s talk trees first,” Philips said. From there he launched into a two hour tour of every tree and shrub and fern and woodland ephemeral on the sloping property. Alex and I followed him around on narrow pathways through densely planted beds that circled the hillside Philips calls home.
“I have nine distinct ecosystems represented here on this property,” he informed us. In addition to the wet and dry conifer forest conditions that naturally existed on his property, where he started our tour, he showed us how he’d created a variety of conditions along his lowbank shoreline. The mudflats were there when he arrived, but Philips also created a gravel beach, tidal benches with aquatic plant life, and a sand beach. He had a brackish water estuarine pocket with dune grass. He built a tidal pool analog, in which sea anemone had attached themselves and small crabs scuttled about.
Towering over this scene was the oldest tree on the property, a Douglas fir that Philips believes to be a couple hundred years old. Shoreline erosion has exposed one side of the tree’s root system. Philips told us that if he had the money, he’d secure the tree on the upslope side with cables attached to other, firmly rooted trees and special anchor points in the ground.
He rattled off the conditions needed for spring ephemerals when I mentioned a particular interest in their propagation, pointing as he went to where each was tucked. “Saprophytes need downed wood on the ground; rattlesnake plantain wants nothing around it; trillium love leaf litter, they can push through layers and layers of maple leaves when nothing else can – plant them near a maple tree; bleeding heart are an easy transplant, pull them off the side of the road and plant them anywhere; good luck with deerfoot – it’s a tough transplant.”
In the end, our two hour tour of Dolphin Place Nature Space lasted for three and included Philips’ “man-cave,” where he showed us, among other things, the skull of a beaked whale he found on his mudflats years ago, an in-progress ceremonial glass paddle – the replica of one used by a Suquamish elder in dozens of canoe journeys – he had been specially commissioned to make, and a satellite launch port that worked like a soda can pop-top he engineered for a space mission. He showed us his footage of a massive herring run that came into Little Manzanita Bay earlier in the year, a parade of glutenous harbor seals and sea lions in tow.
He showed us his aerospace engineering web page, including conceptual open-source plans for what he calls the Bolo Yoyo Space Habitat. Again and again throughout his website, in what I had already come to recognize as Philips’ signature logical progression, the mantra repeats: Life is a gift \ in our uncertain world \ the future is not guaranteed \ however if we work hard together \ we have a chance \ and that is reason for HOPE.
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Our tour ended with the saga of a nearly 20 ton glacial erratic Philips bought with the $500 he had left over after buying his two-acre lot on Bainbridge Island in 1973. The rock, partially submerged in the earth and surrounded by the once-waterproof lining of a now empty pond (the racoons got to it), was placed before the house was built – Philips’ first signature on this land.
Al Philips and his property defy generalization. A reflection of him, Dolphin Place Nature Space contains multitudes, hints at greatness beneath the surface chaos, is substantive beyond measure. As I sat down to put some words to what was easily the most far-ranging three hour interaction I’ve ever had, I found I had more questions than ideas on where to start.
I emailed Philips a number of them, finally concluding, “I guess I'm trying to take a wider view of the person who cares deeply about the minutiae of ecological conditions in a very specific place, but also hopes to encourage a human migration out into the solar system in the event of this place's (maybe unavoidable, maybe imminent) collapse.”
I received, by way of reply, an invitation to come back over to continue our conversation in person (which Alex and I did the next day) and a page of philosophical poetry, including his reply to my attempt at reconciling his wide-ranging passions:
A big question an observant person might consider. Why work on the plumbing in the toilet if the ship is about to sink. The 40,000 foot landscape view shows; 1) humanity has almost always been at risk; 2) humanity has struggled through somehow, likely due to the imperfect efforts of an enormous number of unappreciated individuals; 3) there is no guarantee that we can continue to bat 1000; 4) but it is guaranteed if we don't try, we are doomed; 5) sometimes, when I don't have the energy to rise up and continue the struggle, there is peace in weeding.
