The newest addition to the Alaska Botanical Garden involved years of historical research, a national search for hard-to-find seeds and sweaty, dirty days of digging and planting. But what people seem to notice the most is the bright blue 1947 Chevrolet pickup with red wheels, white sidewall tires and a bed full of green and purple cabbage.
"I can't tell you how many hours staff spent trying to find a truck," said ABG's garden shop manager Ginger Hudson.
The truck is parked at the start of the Anchorage Heritage Garden, a display that reflects -- though it doesn't exactly replicate -- the kind of flower-and-vegetable plot one would have encountered around Anchorage in the early days. Crowded with edible produce intermingled with snapdragons, sweet peas and hand-made fixtures assembled without the metal and plastic store-bought accessories seen in modern gardens, it opens a window on the practicality and aesthetics of settlers 100 years ago.
The garden presents both a style of landscaping and a variety of plants "that were out of public sight for many years," said Executive Director Robin Dublin.
It also makes the modern visitor think about several things: The Anchorage Centennial, which was the occasion for creating the garden; the issue of sustainable food supplies; and the purpose of gardening.
The lush look
The project had its roots, so to speak, with Anchorage artist Ayse Gilbert, a former board member of ABG who has also been involved with the Centennial Celebration. "About five years ago I became interested in old Anchorage gardens," she said. "I had lived here 40 years and never seen anything."
She interviewed the descendants of area pioneers. She consulted local agricultural historians Talis Colberg and Jim Fox. She went through photo archives at the Anchorage Museum and found a trove of material from which she eventually prepared a slide presentation. But the pictures themselves raised questions.
"Where did people get the materials?" she wondered. "The town was started in 1915. By 1917 they had real gardens. And by 1920 there were substantial gardens."
The gardens didn't only sit next to homes. They were found at all public buildings, at the hospital, the fire station. And they included both vegetables and flowers.
"Every old photo has flowers in it," Gilbert said. "Nasturtiums going up and down houses, sweet peas, peonies everywhere, delphiniums, trollius, lilacs, honeysuckle. People wanted the color, the lush look."
Finding Alaskas farming past
Gilbert's research led her to reports from Department of Agriculture experimental stations set up around the territory in the gold rush era. The stations gave seeds and cuttings to residents asking the recipients to write back with how the samples worked. "Many wrote back," said Gilbert, "and that's where the information is extremely interesting."
She was stunned by the variety of plants that were successfully cultivated. It went beyond the potatoes and cabbage associated with local farming today. There were reports and photos of rhubarb leaves the size of doors, corn growing along the Yukon River, oats in Rampart near the Arctic Circle.
"There was a mill in Fairbanks," she said. "In 1920 they raised enough grain to mill 35 tons of flour."
"Alaska gardeners today think we're so trendy for growing something no one's tried here before. But it's not true. They tried all of these things l00 years ago."
The territory was extolled as an untapped cornucopia, with rich soil, few pests and long summer days. In an attempt to attract settlers, the Alaska Railroad hired photographers to document the horticultural successes along its route. C.C. Georgeson, chief agent for the Alaska stations, spoke of "fertile valley land that might be brought under cultivation and made to produce food for millions of people."
"It was a huge deal in the national press," Gilbert said. "There were all these articles about Alaska as the new Sweden."
In the 1920s an American Magazine article reported, "Today 'Alaska-grown' is a phrase seen on placards as far south as Seattle, and the vegetables and berries so labeled command the highest market price because of their superior quality and flavor."
Quest for heirlooms
Gilbert cut off her survey of Anchorage gardens with the 1950s. By that time air freight, the Alaska Highway and more cost-effective shipping were causing Alaskans to shift from home-grown food to canned and frozen goods from the Lower 48. Since then Alaska agriculture has been noted more for its flops than its successes.
But the idea of northern citizens growing most of their own produce, which was the norm in Anchorage through World War II, stuck with Gilbert. A year and a half ago, she suggested that ABG replace its upper perennial garden, which was due for an overhaul, with something that reflected the greenest years of Anchorage history.
Gilbert herself designed the garden in a shape that suggested the backyards of four adjacent houses. The idea was to fill the rows with plant types named in the experiment station reports. But that proved difficult.
The flowers and vegetables found in an Anchorage garden in 1920 would not have been considered rare at the time; they were probably grown all over the country. "My theory is that as people moved west, they brought the plants they knew with them," said Hudson. The varieties weren't necessarily adapted to cold weather or short seasons, but they were familiar to gardeners from the Lower 48.
Over time commercial strands bred for maximum production squeezed out the array of plant types that were scattered across America's home gardens in the years when Anchorage was founded.
"The potatoes were really hard to find," said Hudson. "As taste and size changed, smaller potatoes fell out of favor and it was all narrowed down to the big agribusiness varieties."
ABG staff got some rare strains from the state of Alaska's Plant Materials Center in Palmer. Others came from the Irish Eyes company in Washington. Additional material came from Baker's Creek Seed Company in Missouri and nonprofit Seed Savers Exchange, which specialize in so-called "heirloom" seeds.
Heirloom plants are generally described as open-pollinated breeds -- garden people call them "cultivars" -- that predate the 1950s. At that time industrial food production using hybrids became widespread. Before then there was a greater assortment of food plants with many unique kinds grown in small and distinct locations, sometimes the province of one or two families who passed them from one generation to the next.
After nearly disappearing, these heirlooms have become more popular in recent years, partly as a trend among adventurous gardeners and partly as a hedge against botanical catastrophe. Diseases and pests can wipe out crops that are genetically identical, such as happened in the Irish Potato Famine.
"(The Heritage Garden) probably would have been impossible just 10 years ago," Hudson said. "But about then everyone started getting into heirloom, organic, non-GMO vegetables. There are a lot more resources now."
The garden contains plants that many Anchorage growers may never have seen before: Tall Telephone peas, Early Round Dutch cabbage, Green Mountain and Early Ohio potatoes. There are also flowers, like Painted Tongues, once popular and now considered a novelty. (Select heirloom seeds are sold at the ABG gift shop.)
Entertainment with a message
In some ways, the hardest thing to find was the least organic item -- the 1947 truck. Only recently was one was located -- without an engine. "But we didn't need the engine," said Hudson. "It cost $1,500, but it was worth it. We're not just here to demonstrate gardening, but to entertain as well."
If the entertainment gets people to think about bigger issues, so much the better. "Maybe people will start looking north again," said Gilbert. "No insects, good soil. Who knows?"
"People are rediscovering that when you grow stuff on your own, it tastes better," said Hudson. "It has more nutrition than when it's shipped in."
Today Alaskans depend on shipments for almost all of the food they consume. The question lurks about what would happen if the state were cut off from out-of-state supplies for as little as a week.
In 2012, then-Gov. Sean Parnell proposed creating warehouses in Anchorage and Fairbanks to store enough food to temporarily feed 40,000 in the event of an emergency. The project never got past the proposal stage, but the issue of Alaska "food security" remains on the proverbial table. In the event of a long-term disruption, survival might depend on how much food people could grow on their own.
The people behind the new garden would like to think it will be a good place to come and get ideas.
"I hope this inspires you to build bigger and better gardens of your own," Gilbert told the crowd who attended the Heritage Garden's ribbon-cutting ceremony. "Because Anchorage has a wonderful gardening heritage."
ALASKA BOTANICAL GARDEN is open dawn to dusk all year long at 4601 Campbell Airstrip Road, off Tudor Road. Admission is $10, $8 for seniors, military and children age 5-17.
SEED SAVERS EXCHANGE board member Rosalind Creasy, author of "Edible Landscaping, Now You Can Have Your Gorgeous Garden and Eat it Too!" and other books, will speak at 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 6, at the BP Energy Center, a fundraiser for ABG. Tickets are $25, $20 for ABG members. More information at alaskabg.org.