Trail Sign Information
Polly Judd Park
Who Was Polly Judd?
The daughter of an orchardist and banker, Polly Mitchel grew up in the Yakima Valley and attended school with another champion of the natural world, future Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. She attended Washington State University for two years, until her parents brought her home during the 1918 flu epidemic. She then graduated from business school before marrying civil engineer Thomas H. Judd in 1922. Nine years later, they and their three young daughters moved to Spokane, where Thomas worked for Washington Water Power.
Shrubby penstemon. Photo by Mark Turner
Polly immediately joined the Manito Garden Club, the Campfire Girls, and the American Legion Auxiliary fife and drum corps, where she played the bass drum. She also applied her considerable energy to her own yard, winning the award for “Garden Beautification in a Rented Home” in the 1935 Spokesman-Review Yard & Garden Contest. That fall she volunteered to chair a Roadside Beautification project to plant wildflowers and shrubs along the road to Mount Spokane. Thomas, who shared her love of plants, helped her collect two shoeboxes of shrubby blue penstemon seeds to add to the many gunny sacks and boxes of various seeds that her committee gathered for a CCC landscape crew to plant.
Polly Judd on one of the paths in her hillside garden. Photo courtesy of The Spokesman-Review.
That same year, she and Thomas purchased a house on Oak Street, on the western edge of the South Hill. They set about the challenge of landscaping the large yard, which dropped into a steep draw overlooking Hangman Creek. Four years later, Polly won a Special Award for Hillside Garden in the Spokesman-Review Yard & Garden Contest.
The caption accompanying the photo of her garden noted: “Mrs. Polly Mitchell Judd has, with unbounded energy and intelligent planning, created an extremely interesting wall, rock, and water garden, having lily ponds and bird baths and a fine expanse of lawn to the west... She is shown on the stone steps that extend alongside and behind the house, which lead to various levels, with most interesting plantings at every turn, and commands extensive views of the Latah valley and the hills to the south and west.”
In the late 1930s, Polly also served as president of the Associated Garden Clubs and was heavily involved in their campaign to promote Spokane as the “Lilac City of the Northwest” and establish an annual lilac festival. To celebrate the second festival, she recruited her drum and bugle corps to meet all the trains and buses arriving in Spokane with bouquets of lilacs.
In the spring of 1939, upon learning that an area on Mount Spokane’s south slope was slated for logging, Judd chaired a committee to “Save the Forests of Mount Spokane.” The drive raised enough money through small donations to purchase the 320-acre plot and donate it to the state park.
Thomas served in the U.S. Army Engineers during World War II, and their three daughters finished school and married in the late ‘40s. Polly continued as a stalwart member of the Manito Garden Club, the Lilac Festival committee, and the board of the Finch Arboretum. She gave frequent talks on taxonomy, mulching, composting, earthworms, and Japanese flower arranging. She and Thomas served as officers of the Northwest Conservation League, the Spokane Native Plant Conservation Society, and the Rose Society. In 1954 she chaired the Spokane River Improvement Project to plant trees & shrubs along bare banks of the Spokane River near the Howard Street bridge and an adjacent peninsula that she and twenty-five of her garden club cohorts dubbed “Aching Back Island” after planting more than 500 sprouts in one day.
Events in the Park
Friends of the Bluff hosts volunteer events and Bluff Walks in the area throughout the year, but their most popular plein air art event takes place in the park every May.
In the 1960s, the Associated Garden Clubs and other interested parties began lobbying to build a Japanese Tea Garden in an unused corner of Manito Park. After the Park Board approved the concept in 1964, Polly and Thomas donated to the project and helped with fundraising efforts. Thomas surveyed the site and drew a topographic map for the eminent landscape designer Nagao Sakurai, who traveled to Spokane to design the garden. Partway through construction, Sakurai suffered a stroke that paralyzed his entire left side. It seemed impossible for the garden designer to continue because he spoke no English, but Polly helped realize his vision. She would bundle Sakurai and his wheelchair into a taxi, take him to Manito Park, and write instructions for the workers according to the gestures of his remaining good hand. Together, Mrs. Judd’s sketches and Sakurai’s mind finished the iconic tea garden.
Photo courtesy of the Spokesman-Review.
After her death in 1981 at age 83, the Associated Garden Clubs installed a traditional Japanese fountain, or tsukubai, in her memory. That fountain can still be viewed in Manito Park’s Japanese Garden.
Thomas and Polly Judd’s former home at the end of Oak Street sits above the park that now bears her name. The site was used as a dumping ground for debris from the construction of Expo ‘74 and was later preserved from development by a group of determined activists from the Historic Cannon’s Addition neighborhood. In 1997, as the park was nearing completion, several garden clubs urged the Spokane Parks Department to name it in honor of Polly Judd in recognition of her ardent support for the city’s gardens and public spaces.
Today, remnants of some of her 85 lilac varieties and a few ornaments that decorated her prize-winning garden remain visible along the edge of the park.
Photo by Jack Nisbet