On this episode of News in Depth, KBOO's Nina Mayfair dives deep on the funding crisis and historical significance of Portland's Leach Botanical Garden.
At the corner of 122nd and Foster in Southeast Portland, there's a 16-acre forest sanctuary that almost didn't come to exist. Today it's known as a hidden jewel of the city, the result of a nearly 100-year community intention.
Some people don't even know it's here, while others rely on it for peace in the city. But after recovering from its time as a sawmill and a pig farm in the early 1900s, being spared from decades of urban development, and surviving a brush with abandonment in the 80s, this land is at a crossroads again.
To understand what's at stake, we need to look back at the two people who rescued the land nearly a century ago, and the world they built here. A private refuge that is now a cornerstone of the community. And although the plan to keep this place wild has been upheld by a 95-year streak of land stewardship, that future is uncertain today.
We know it as Leach Botanical Garden.
And if you live in an old Southeast Portland home, there's a chance your walls are made of timber grown and processed on the very same soil. But in 1931, when Lilla and John Leach looked at a plot depleted by its industrial and agricultural past, they saw the quiet potential they'd spent years dreaming of.
For just $10, they bought the chance to restore a barren ravine into a lush botanical sanctuary.
To find the garden today, you have to head to the edge of the Lents neighborhood, where the deep green of the forest meets the gray of the urban corridor. If you step off the asphalt of 122nd Avenue and move into the trails of the garden, the first thing you notice is the sound. The hum of southeast Portland doesn't disappear, but it gets pushed into the background by something much older...
- KBOO