The love story that grew Seattle's 'secret garden'

Since 1972, the Streissguth Gardens have become one of Seattle’s most unique landmarks. The gardens take up a full acre of hillside just west of Capitol Hill’s Volunteer Park.

If you’ve spent a morning running up the long Blaine Street Stairs, you’ve passed right by the gardens. But the story of how this unorthodox public garden came to be is one of coincidence, love, and perhaps a bit of magic.

Walk down Broadway East on any given day, and you're likely to find Ben Streissguth in his trademark cowboy hat, digging through flower beds.

Streissguth is the current caretaker of Streissguth Gardens, an acre plot of trails, trees, bushes, and ferns. To passersby, he’s a trove of information — an encyclopedia of flora, a family historian, and he's known to make a great apple cider.

The Streissguth Gardens are situated between the luxurious mansions of old-school Capitol Hill and the towering pillars of the I-5 bike park. The actual street that the garden is on, Broadway East, is a dead end, meaning most of the gardens' 10,000 visitors have to climb the Blaine Street Stairs. The stairs hold the most Seattle of honors as one of the longer urban stairways in the country, at 293 steps.

Like much of the gardens' planning, that proximity is largely coincidental.

"The whole garden itself was never developed with a master plan," Streissguth said. "It was developed kind of incrementally. Mostly we would set trails going to where we needed to get access to, or plant areas depending on the microclimates that were showing up as my parents and I were developing it."

Ben's parents, Ann and Dan, met as neighbors in 1963. Dan was a beginning architect and had just built a home that still sits at the corner of the gardens today. Ann was studying for a Ph.D. at the University of Washington, where she was pioneering research on fetal alcohol syndrome.

"Her car actually broke down and she was wandering around, waiting for a mechanic," Streissguth said. "[She] found a studio apartment for rent in the building that my dad used to live in, and they met as neighbors. Became good friends. She ended up renting and then buying the house next door to him."

The two bonded over their mutual love of gardening, and three years after Ann moved next door, they married. Ann purchased the apartment building across the street, which happened to include two lots adjacent to Dan's custom home.

At first, the Streissguths thought they might develop the lots into more buildings, but ultimately they couldn't afford it. So, as their gardens grew, they bled onto the untamed lots next door, which were filled with blackberry bushes, ivy, horsetail, and bracken fern.

When Ben came around, his parents were already cutting into the urban jungle to expand the garden. They made sporadic trails to make the work easier, which became a kind of forest playground for Ben. Locals kept passing by on the Blaine Street Stairs, putting in workouts and trying navigating the inclines of Seattle's neighborhoods.

As the times changed, old Seattle growing into the new, the land the gardens were growing on became more valuable. For years, the neighborhood successfully fought off developments like 12-unit condos, and 20-car underground parking garages.

But in 1989, a King County Open Space and Trails Bond (titled Proposition 2) allocated $41 million to Seattle for the preservation of open spaces at risk of development. The Streissguth's parcel — along with three similarly wild lots next door — were on the city's radar.

In negotiations, the Streissguth’s offered to gift the two lots of gardens they'd been growing to the city, on the condition that the city purchase the three adjacent lots to stave off development.

The city agreed with their plan, and the gardens became public. Though, the Streissguth's wanted to retain the right to take care of it.

"We bought the land, and then we started developing it as a garden. And then it became clear that people were enjoying it, and so we started inviting people in," Ben Streissguth said. "But a lot of people still refer to us as a 'secret garden'.... And I love it. I love the fact that we can feel like a secret garden, but still be so public, and have so many people love us."

Dan Streissguth passed away in Nov. 2020, at the age of 96. Ann Streissguth passed away this last August, at the age of 90. They were married for more than 50 years.

Ben is now the primary caretaker of the gardens, and while his parents may have been garden enthusiasts, he's taken that green thumb to a new level. Out of high school he tried his luck at computer science, before falling into a landscape maintenance business. Some years and degrees after that, he found his way back to the garden, a newly minted landscape architect, and a horticulturalist.

"I don't know how my parents managed to make it fun and exciting, and you know I just loved it," he said. "And, of course, the garden was growing with me."

For future stewardship of the garden, the family started the Streissguth Garden Conservancy. They’re hopeful it can eventually help fund the garden, and with Seattle's Parks Department, guide future management of this complex maze of plants.

The city officially owns the land, and maintaining the variety of plants they've grown here is a full-time job for Ben. But for the time being, the garden has added one new caretaker: Ben's wife, Jade.

Similar to his parents, they met through the garden. Jade studied to be a landscape architect, and was planning to visit the gardens with a friend. When they couldn't make it, she found Ben in the garden, and the two began talking.

"We knew the minute we started talking that there were sparks flying," Ben Streissguth said.

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