Category: Gallery

Location: Elk Rock Garden, 11800 S Military Lane, Portland

Time: 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM, PT

Price: $65

Purchase Tickets: https://olmsted.org/events/olmsted-salon-private-designs-in-the-pacific-northwest/

Join the Olmsted Network for an intimate gathering exploring the remarkable and often-overlooked legacy of Olmsted-designed private estates and residential communities across Portland and the Pacific Northwest.

Held at Elk Rock Garden, one of the Pacific Northwest’s finest surviving Olmsted-influenced estates, now lovingly stewarded as a public landscape, this special salon brings together homeowners, preservation advocates, landscape and design professionals, real estate leaders, and admirers of historic places for an afternoon of conversation, connection, and exploration.

Guests will enjoy: 

• A private luncheon overlooking the gardens 
• Guided tours of Elk Rock Gardens and select interiors 
• Conversations exploring the remarkable and largely hidden network of Olmsted-designed private landscapes and communities that continue to shape neighborhoods across the Pacific Northwest
• Opportunities to connect with professionals and enthusiasts engaged in architecture, landscape design, historic preservation, and estate stewardship 

Whether you live in an Olmsted-designed community, care for a historic property, work in design or preservation, or simply appreciate exceptional landscapes, this gathering offers a rare opportunity to experience an important chapter of the Olmsted legacy while connecting with others who share a passion for thoughtful design, stewardship, and cultural heritage.

Attendance is intentionally limited to foster meaningful conversation and personal connections. Guests are encouraged to carpool or use rideshare services due to limited parking at Elk Rock Garden and to help preserve the intimate character of the event.

Tickets are $65 per person.

This special luncheon is open to both conference participants and members of the broader Portland community with an interest in historic landscapes, architecture, and preservation.

Also consider attending the Olmsted Network’s 2026 Annual Conference: The Power of Connection: Shaping Resilient Public Landscapes—taking place September 23–25 at OSU’s Portland Center. 

Join us for our first annual Tea in the Garden fundraiser at Elk Rock Garden on Saturday, June 27 at 2pm.

Launch your summer season with an afternoon of elegance, purpose and generosity! And be sure to dress the part: seersucker, fancy hats and floral attire are strongly encouraged.

A limited number of tickets are still available for $250 each. Reserve yours here.

Elk Rock Garden is a private, nonprofit garden that has been free and open to the public since 1959. Your ticket purchase and attendance at this event directly support our mission to conserve, restore and enhance this historic property as a community resource and a nationally-recognized center for nature-based learning and climate resilience.

* The botanical drawing featured above dates to the early 1900s. According to archival photos, forget-me-nots were growing in abundance at Elk Rock Garden around the same time period. The Pacific Northwest is home to two native varieties of forget-me-nots: Myosotis laxa (a wetland variety) and Myosotis Alpestris (a subalpine variety.) Both have bloomed in this region for centuries.

Don’t forget to reserve your ticket!

We are currently seeking a few in-kind donations to help support the day-to-day operations of Elk Rock Garden.

If you are downsizing, renovating, or have items at home that are looking for a new home, we would love to hear from you!

Our current wish list includes:

• A gently used washer and dryer (stackable or side-by-side) for laundering tablecloths, hand towels, dish towels, and our volunteers’ gardening gloves.
• Two rolling office chairs with arms.
• One or two wooden desks that would look at home in our historic manor house.
• An oversized antique wool rug (at least 10′ x 14′) for our meeting space.
• Lightweight folding tables

We are also seeking corporate sponsors who would like to support the preservation and public enjoyment of this remarkable historic garden through sponsorships (monetary or in-kind. ) We are particularly interested in donations of lumber, paint/painting services, and AV equipment for our lecture space.

If you might be able to help with any of these needs — or would like to learn more about sponsorship opportunities at the garden — please contact us at info@elkrockgarden.org.

Thank you!

In November 2025, construction began on the interior of the Elk Rock Garden manor house, allowing us to make significant upgrades to a number of key building systems including plumbing, wiring, insulation, and HVAC. We also tackled extensive asbestos abatement, andrepaired cracked plaster, updated restrooms, refinished wood floors, and added fresh carpeting and paint throughout.

The house is now home to the our own nonprofit organization, as well as two wonderful tenant/partners: Willamette Riverkeeper and the Hardy Plant Society of Oregon.

We have space for one or two more mission-aligned tenant-partners in the building, depending on staff size. We are specifically interested organizations focused on gardening, horticulture, pollinators, environmental issues, climate adaptation or conservation/preservation. (Because of our nonprofit status, we can only rent to other nonprofit organizations.)

Rental rates start at $600/month and include office space, parking space, kitchen access, utilities, housekeeping, wi-fi, shared meeting space, storage, and unlimited access to our beautiful historic garden.

Interested organizations should email stephanie@elkrockgarden.org for more information.

On Saturday, May 9, Elk Rock Garden hosted its first-ever Three Garden Tour, giving ticketholders a rare opportunity to explore three historic Kerr Family Gardens: Elk Rock Garden (the beloved home and garden of Peter Kerr) and the homes and gardens of his two daughters, Jane (Kerr) Platt and Ann (Kerr) McDonald.

The weather was perfect; our hosts, visitors, and volunteers were fabulous; and the energy was absolutely magical!

Together we raised $7,500 for the care and maintenance of Elk Rock Garden. Thank you to all who made this possible (with an extra special thank you to David and Lisa Platt, and Todd Liebow and Anita Barbey, for sharing their gardens with our tourgoers!)

We’re already dreaming about future offerings. Tell us in the comments: what kind of tour would you love to attend next?

🌷Another Three Garden Tour?
✨ A manor house tour?
🌿 Horticultural deep-dives?
📜 History-focused garden tours?
🔭 A look at our future plans?
🏛️ Historic preservation tours?

Drop your vote below — we can’t wait to do this again!

May is National Preservation Month, and here at Elk Rock Garden, we’re marking the occasion with some exciting news, and a renewed call to action.

Last year, we launched our first-ever mid-year appeal, asking you to invest in the future of our beloved historic garden. Your response exceeded all expectations! This May, we’re proud to continue that tradition, and even prouder to share what your generosity has made possible over the past twelve months.

A YEAR OF MEANINGFUL PROGRESS

Since our Preservation Fund launched in September 2025, we’ve accomplished more than we could have hoped:

Outside, we built a new metal support structure for our largest wisteria vines, repaired three large sections of historic stone retaining wall along our upper parking lot and cliffwalk, and rebuilt a deteriorating set of stone steps leading out to portion of our property known as The Point.

We also constructed two small wooden ramps connecting our brick pathways to our patio, making the lectures, workshops and and other programming we hold in our chapel wheelchair and walker accessible for the first time.

Inside the manor house, we completed a full restoration of the entire second floor (and a portion of the third floor) including lead and asbestos abatement, plaster repair, new wiring and plumbing, fresh paint, new carpeting, remodeled bathrooms, restored wooden windows, and updated heating, cooling and lighting.

This work has allowed us to move new tenants into our building (welcome Willamette Riverkeeper!), an important step toward the garden’s long-term financial sustainability.

WHY THIS WORK MATTERS

Elk Rock Garden has been free and open to the public since 1959. Since we don’t charge admission, everything we do to restore, maintain, and improve this garden depends on the support of our community.

The progress we’ve made this year is a testament to what’s possible when people who love this place come together. But there is still much work to do, and the longer critical repairs and improvements are delayed, the more costly they become.

Remaining projects include:

• Roof Repair
• Exterior Trim Paint
• Kitchen Improvements
• Chapel Upgrades
• Wood Floor Refinishing
• Visitor Center Repairs
• Footbridge Rebuild
• Patio Repairs
• Pavement and Brick Path Repairs
• New Exterior Benches
• Safety Railings
• Public Restrooms

HOW YOU CAN HELP

This Preservation Month, we’re asking you to be part of our next chapter. A tax-deductible gift to the Elk Rock Garden Preservation Fund goes directly toward protecting and restoring this irreplaceable piece of Oregon’s heritage, so that it remains a living, thriving place for generations to come.

We hope you will consider making a tax-deductible donations here.

Thank you in advance for your continued love and support of Elk Rock Garden.

At the close of 2025 we began a new chapter in our stewardship of Elk Rock Garden by partnering with ISA Board Certified Master Arborist Rick Till to assess the health of our trees and develop a plan for addressing deferred maintenance. This spring, that partnership blossomed into two memorable events that brought together some of the region’s finest arboricultural talent.

Arborists at Elk Rock Garden — March 21, 2025

On a sunny Saturday morning in March, an enthusiastic group of arborists arrived at Elk Rock Garden at 7:30 am to join our staff and interns for coffee, snacks, and a brief introduction to the property’s history and vision for the future. Then we got to work!

The day’s tasks were wide-ranging. Seven Oregon white oaks had dead wood removed from large branches hanging over walking paths. Arborists also inspected cables in four of those oaks, and searched high and low for any signs of Mediterranean Oak Borer (MOB), a precaution with particular urgency for our garden. (Last summer, Elk Rock Garden partnered with the West Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District to serve as a MOB monitoring site for 14 weeks. In the final week of monitoring, a single MOB was discovered in one of our traps, thus vigilance is essential.)

Additional projects included end-weight reduction on a deodar cedar, deadwood removal from a large Douglas fir, and a variety of smaller projects across the garden.

After a busy and productive morning, we celebrated a job well done with a pizza party on our patio. Our hope is to make this a recurring event.

A Pruning Workshop with Masa Mizuno — March 28, 2025

Exactly one week after the Arborists at Elk Rock Garden event, Rick Till returned to the garden with landscape contractor Masa Mizuno to lead a pruning workshop for practicing arborists seeking continuing education credits.

Masa has worked in the Portland area since the early 1980s, including four years as a garden technician at the Portland Japanese Garden. He is widely known for his work designing and maintaining Pacific Northwest gardens that draw on Japanese garden traditions — and for his thoughtful philosophy of pruning. Inspired by authentic Japanese gardens, Masa believes that plants should be pruned to allow them to inhabit their space comfortably, and that gardeners must remain open to relocating or removing plants that are no longer thriving where placed. Central to his teaching philosophy is the importance of maintaining the right ratio of open space, so that each plant can assume balanced proportions in relation to the landscape around it.

At Elk Rock Garden, Masa demonstrated his techniques on rhododendrons, azaleas, small conifers, and a Japanese maple — giving attendees both practical skills and a deeper framework for thinking about the living landscape.

---

Many thanks to Rick Till and Masa Mizuno for making both of these events possible, and to the talented professionals who generously donated a combined 115 hours worth of time and expertise to improve the health of our trees, including: Morgan Fay, Van Bogner, Josh Tybring, Andy Boyer, Charlie Boyer, Andy Teel, Eric Campbell, Miranda Williams, Cash Cuddington, Christian Cerri, John Buttrell, Kevin Hillery, Blake Thomas, Brett Cassidy, Jackson Chandler, Jon Brown, Karen Tillou, Travis Cooke, Will Koomjian, Lars Limburge, Em Hay, Hayden Young, Robert Bundy, Kameron Christiansen, Will Perkins, and our interns, Garett van der Spek and Brian Hart.

And an extra special thank you to our board secretary Nancy Truszkowski for providing pizza for everyone!

Three Gardens. Two Generations. One Unforgettable Day.

On May 9, 2026, Elk Rock Garden invites you to experience something quite rare: a day spent exploring three extraordinary private gardens, each shaped by the Kerr family’s shared love of plants.

You will enjoy guided tours of:

Elk Rock Garden: Peter Kerr’s beloved estate garden is one of Portland’s great horticultural treasures. (Light refreshments will be provided at Elk Rock Garden on tour day.)

Jane Kerr Platt’s Garden: A stunning collection of mature specimen trees, rhododendrons, and witch hazels occupy a former orchard property designed by Jane Kerr Platt and John Platt, anchored by a Pietro Belluschi-designed home, and now stewarded by David and Lisa Platt.

Lady McDonald’s Garden: Designed in 1940 by the legendary Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver, this terraced garden reflects Lady Anne Kerr McDonald’s masterful eye for flowering woody shrubs and rare trees, now owned and cared for by Todd Liebow and Anita Barbey.

This is first time all three gardens have been open simultaneously in years, offering an unusual opportunity for garden lovers to enjoy guided tours of each all on the same day!

Tickets: $75 | All proceeds support the restoration of Elk Rock Garden

With only 100 spots available, tickets will almost certainly sell out!

Reserve your spot here: givebutter.com/3GardenTour

*photo credits: Stephanie Brown, Lisa Platt, Janet Loughrey

In November, construction began in the Elk Rock Garden manor house, allowing us to make upgrades to a number of key building systems including plumbing, wiring and HVAC. We are doing our best to keep disruptions in the garden to a minimum, while working to ensure the building’s long-term preservation. 

Continue reading “Mission-Aligned Nonprofit Office Partners Sought”

Elk Rock Garden is looking for volunteers to assist our gardener with raking, weeding, the removal of invasive plants, and other garden maintenance tasks. We also welcome volunteers for help with administrative tasks, fundraising and special events.

If you have a talent you’d like to put to use at the garden, please provide your contact information and the skills you’d like to share by filling out this online form:

https://elkrockgarden.org/volunteer/