Bijou’s Garden Restoration
Horticulturist Amanda Goodwin has coined Bijou’s Garden “the heart” of Betty Ford Alpine Gardens, and for good reason.
Bijou’s Garden stands just beyond the Gardens’s primary entrance near the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater. An island-like garden affording 360-views, its varied composition of color, texture, stem, and bloom draws its visitors in and around this initial focal point. If Bijou’s Garden serves as the heart of Betty Ford Alpine Gardens, its recent restoration has pumped life into the Gardens.
More than just its location, Bijou’s Garden is a symbolic core for the Gardens’ history—and the human hands that came together to make the Betty Ford Alpine Gardens possible. The garden itself is a living memorial to the life of Bijou Davies, a canine member of the Betty Ford Alpine Gardens community. Funding for the garden, including its recent renovation, comes from Bijou’s human family, Mary and David Davies.
Bijou’s Garden likewise showcases the longstanding relationships embedded in the Gardens as they have come to entwine with the life of the plants there. Home to the famed Sheika and Betty Ford daylilies, the garden is a mantlepiece of the history of Betty Ford Alpine Gardens as it features one of its defining friendships. The two daylilies serve as testaments to the former first lady Betty Ford, for whom the Gardens are named, and Sheika Gramshammer, a longtime trustee and supporter of the Gardens. The daylilies are planted side by side, as a monument to the friendship between Gramshammer and Ford; the flowers, as Goodwin has remarked, are close enough in proximity “to chat,” nestled at the forefront of the garden.
This summer, high school interns, Julia and Michaela, along with summer horticultural interns, Tate Erickson and Rowan Nygard, helped to plant new flowers, as a part of the Bijou’s revitalization project. Their efforts helped to secure the legacies embodied in Bijou’s Garden, while perpetuating the Gardens’s special tendency to cultivate friendships.
Bijou’s Garden features a new color palette—one that reflects the role Bijou’s Garden plays as the heart of the gardens. Thanks to the efforts of the summer interns, burgundy hollyhocks now crown a bed flushed with pink peonies. The oft-visited Sheika and Betty Ford daylilies are joined by opulent royal wedding poppies, with white blooms and deep maroon centers. The wonderful red palette captured in the various blooms conveys an important implication of Goodwin’s sentiment: if Bijou’s garden is the heart of the Betty Ford Alpine Gardens, the plants, in all their multifaceted iterations, are the lifeblood.
