The Garden That 400 People Built

I showed up for volunteer orientation at the Bellevue Botanical Garden expecting to learn where the compost bins were. I left three hours later with a completely revised picture of my city. Turns out the garden is run by a coalition of nine nonprofits and the City of Bellevue. Four hundred volunteers. Seventeen thousand five hundred hours a year. Free and open to the public — always. This episode: land acknowledgments, salamanders in leaf piles, extinct birds in a sculpture garden, a couple who