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Article Bibliography

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Garden History

The Kruckeberg Botanic Garden was founded in 1958 when Dr. Art Kruckeberg and his wife Mareen moved to a 4-acre farmhouse in then mostly rural Shoreline. Over the ensuing decades they created the garden, growing nearly every plant from seed or cutting.

Art and Mareen took an informal, naturalistic approach to design, combining Northwest native plants with unusual and rarely cultivated species collected from the West coast and around the world.

Visitors relaxing in the courtyard area. Photo by David Berger

The result is a unique Puget Sound Basin woodland garden. You’ll find over 2,000 different plant species represented, including conifers, hardwoods, rhododendrons, and magnolias; plus such delightful herbaceous plants as cyclamens, wood sorrel, fawn lilies, and inside-out flower. The garden is especially strong in collections of maples, oaks, conifers and ferns, and several trees are the largest or rarest in the state. “There’s no better place to see our native rhododendron, maples, oaks and conifers grown mature in a residential-scale garden,” says The Seattle Times.

Professor Kruckeberg giving a tour to community college students in 2007. Photo by David Berger

Dr. Arthur R. Kruckeberg, a professor emeritus of Botany at the University of Washington, is an octogenarian still active in the garden. Mareen S. Kruckeberg, who lived to be 77 and passed away in 2003, was a self-taught botanist whose extensive knowledge of propagation and cultural techniques led to her founding the MsK Rare Plant Nursery. The nursery, popular among plant connoisseurs, continues to operate on-site.

The MsK Nursery at the Kruckeberg Botanic Garden. Photo by David Berger

Both Art and Mareen were active with local horticultural societies and both helped formed several that are still running today, such as the Washington Native Plant Society, the Hardy Fern Foundation, the Northwest Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society and the Northwest Horticultural Society. They collaborated on the creation of “Gardening with Native Plants of the Pacific Northwest,” a classic guide for novice and experienced gardeners alike, named one of the “top 50 gardening books of all time” by the American Horticultural Society.

The legacy of these two horticultural icons, like the roots of a healthy oak, spread powerfully into the soil and psyche of the Pacific Northwest. The botanical richness of their home in Richmond Beach is a living expression of their generous and abundantly creative lives.

A more detailed biography of the garden and its founders is below.

The upper woodland area. Photo by David Berger

More Details

Arthur Rice Kruckeberg was born March 21, 1920, the first day of spring, in Los Angeles. His grandfather and father owned and operated Kruckeberg Press, a successful printing business that specialized in horticultural matters. In 1941 Arthur graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Occidental College with a B.A. in biology (there was no botany major), then went on to graduate school at Stanford. He was married in 1942 to Lyle Elayne Moore, with whom he eventually had three children. His academic career was interrupted by WW II: from 1942-46 he served as an officer in naval intelligence. After training in the Japanese language, he served in the Pacific Fleet, interrogating prisoners during the Philippines campaign and serving as interpreter in Japan and the Marianas Islands after hostilities had ended. Art returned to graduate studies in 1946, this time at the University of California, Berkeley, with its strong botany faculty. By 1950 he had earned the Ph.D. in botany. That same year Dr. Kruckeberg began a long and very distinguished career on the faculty of the University of Washington, where his major interests were in regional floras and vegetation on “azonal” substrates (soils not normally found in a given region). He retired from the UW in 1989 as Professor Emeritus of Botany. He has accomplished much professionally, including publishing six books: Gardening with Native Plants of the Pacific Northwest (1982); California Serpentines: Flora, Vegetation, Geology, Soils, and Management Problems (1984); The Natural History of Puget Sound Country (1991); Geology and Plant Life: The Effects of Landforms and Rock Types on Plants (2002); Best Wildflower Hikes Washington (2004); and Introduction to California Soils and Plants: Serpentine, Vernal Pools, and Other Geobotanical Wonders (2006). Dr. Kruckeberg is now working on two more books. He is a co-founder of the Washington Native Plant Society.

Mareen Schultz Kruckeberg was born January 10, 1925, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Mareen passed away on January 1, 2003. She moved to Washington State as a child. Separated from her birth family at age five, she was adopted at age eight and grew up in West Seattle. Her mother was a teacher and her father a gardener and a lumber mill employee. An early interest in plants arose during trips with her mother and aunt to such places as Mt. Rainier and Olympic Hot Springs, and that interest was cultivated by the attention of park rangers to a bright and inquisitive youngster. After finishing high school in 1942, Mareen worked for the U.S. Army in Alaska for five years, at the University of Alaska.

Mareen entered the University of Washington in 1951. Her initial interest was in trees, which necessitated prerequisite studies in basic botany. Art knew Mareen as a student, and she distinguished herself academically on a summer field trip he led in 1952. Art and Mareen were married in 1953, a year after he was left a widower and father following the untimely death of his first wife. The sudden new responsibility for raising three young children made it impossible for Mareen to continue at the University, but her interest in botany and horticulture continued to grow.


The family grew to six in 1957 with the birth of Mareen’s first child, and soon they were looking for more living and gardening space than was afforded by their Capitol Hill home. Mareen discovered property for sale in Richmond Beach, about two miles uphill from Puget Sound, and, in love with the potential of the property for a garden, agreed to buy without even looking at the house itself! (Such a decision was extraordinary, making both owner and neighbors curious about these strange buyers.) Mareen and Art’s new purchase, at 20066 (now 20312) 15th Avenue NW, was about one acre in area, with a two-story house and a separate two-car garage. The house had been built in about 1904 as a farmhouse, then remodeled in 1938.

The Richmond Beach House, pretty much as Mareen found it. 1939 image. Photo courtesy of Washington State Archives, Puget Sound Regional Branch.

The first settlers had arrived in Richmond Beach only about seventy years before, and in the late 1950s the property on 15th Avenue NW was still more rural than suburban, with much nearby pasture land and even a log cabin to the east. Much of the landscape was dominated by old, late-successional Douglas fir. It was a place where Art and Mareen could realize a shared, passionate ambition to create a garden in which the native landscape would be preserved, but complemented with rare and unusual woody and herbaceous plants from other lands. The Kruckeberg family moved there from Capitol Hill in late 1958.

The Krucekberg meadow in 1961.
Photo courtesy of Art Kruckeberg.

The Kruckeberg house in Richmond Beach, 1964.
Photo courtesy of Art Kruckeberg.

Mareen’s father, Grandpa Schultz, soon purchased the property that bordered Art and Mareen’s acre to the east. That land, mostly lower lying, had been a strawberry field, and it wasn’t long before it became pasture for the children’s horses. In 1963 a fifth child joined the Kruckeberg family. In the 1960s the original farmhouse was remodeled again, and Grandpa Schultz converted the garage into a cozy cottage for his wife and himself.

The garage while it was undergoing Grandpa Schultz's remodel into a cottage, in 1960.
Photo Courtesty of Washington State Archives Puget Sound Regional Branch.

The cottage in 1961.
Photo courtesy of Art Kruckeberg.

Mareen’s mother passed away only a year after they moved in, but Grandpa lived there for 17 years and contributed in many ways, including building a fence around all four acres and maintaining a vegetable garden anyone would be proud of. He was the resident expert on gardening, carpentry and the care of grandchildren, and a man much loved by everyone in the neighborhood. A neighbor once expressed it well, saying she wanted only one thing under the Christmas tree: a grandpa.

Mareen’s interest in plants led to construction of her first greenhouse, completed in 1970. By then she was known in horticultural circles as an expert in growing and caring for plants, both native and exotic. When Mareen realized that the occasional sale of plants to friends and neighbors was “extra-legal,” MsK Rare Plant Nursery was born and certified with a business license for which she paid the grand sum of $1.00. A second greenhouse was added in January 1976, and the Nursery continued to grow and thrive.

The MsK Greenhouse, 1973.
Photo by Mareen Kruckeberg, courtesy of Art Kruckeberg.

The second greenhouse, a lean-to conservatory, in 1976.
Photo courtesy of Art Kruckeberg.

MsK Rare Plant Nursery is now well known for the annual Mother’s Day open house and plant sale, a custom that began in 1987.

Meanwhile, both Art and Mareen had been busy introducing a wide variety of trees, shrubs and herbs to the property, including the lower pasture after the family interest in horses subsided. They brought some plants with them in 1958, including a four-foot Sequoiadendron giganteum, the giant sequoia tree that is now a towering specimen. Generally, though, growth of the garden depended less on collecting than on cuttings and seed from their own established plants and seed from various botanic gardens and seed exchanges. The resulting landscape is a mix of native species with choice specimens from other lands, mostly China and Japan. The Kruckeberg Botanic Garden has four State Champion trees by virtue of their size (height and girth), as published in Champion Trees of Washington State by Robert Van Pelt. They are TAN OAK (Lithocarpus densiflorus), the mutant TAN OAK (L. densiflorus forma attenuato-dentatus), STRIPED BARK MAPLE (Acer davidii), and CHOKE CHERRY (Prunus virginiana). The Garden also has a number of notable rare exotic trees, including ORIENTAL SPRUCE (Picea orientalis), BREWER'S SPRUCE (Picea breweriana), CHILEAN FIRE TREE (Embothrium coccineum) and Eucryphia glutinosa, to name just a few. The fruit of the Kruckebergs’ labor is a magnificent, park-like botanic garden that, almost 50 years later, has gained regional significance.

A contemporary view of the Kruckeberg Botanic Garden. Photo by Alex Hayden.

The Kruckebergs introduced plantings of unusual, rarely cultivated species from other regions and worked to preserve and enhance the native plant collection under a canopy of old-growth Douglas fir. The Garden includes about 2,000 different species, both native and non-native: exotic conifers (larches, sequoias, pines, firs, spruces and hemlocks); hardwoods, especially oaks and maples; rhododendrons; magnolias; and a host of other woody plants. The displays of ferns, cyclamens, wood sorrel and inside-out flower are distinctive.

A contemporary view of the lower meadow. Photo by Alex Hayden.

On October 14, 2003, Art Kruckeberg signed a Grant Deed of Conservation Easement that protects his property in perpetuity from development. Susan Dunn signed on behalf of the E.B. Dunn Historic Garden Trust, formalizing the Trust’s acceptance of responsibility as Donee to oversee compliance with terms of the Easement. Mrs. Dunn was then Chair of the E.B. Dunn Historic Garden Trust's Board of Directors. Cascade Land Conservancy is the Easement’s co-Donee.