BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER / PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN SCOTT

In dry western Washington, a fruit company compound by Berger Partnership all but vanishes in a shroud of native plantings.

FROM THE AUGUST 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

The shift takes place just past Cle Elum. Driving the 140 miles from Seattle to Yakima, Washington, crossing the Cascade Range at Snoqualmie Pass, the landscape seems to dissolve in the span of a few minutes. The ponderosa pine forest gives way to high desert so quickly it’s as if the towering trees had been shrunk by a laser, transfigured into gnarly sagebrush. Dotting eastern Washington’s arid, gray-brown shrub steppe are green pastures, fields, orchards, and farms. The Yakima Valley is one of the most productive regions in Washington, thanks to a massive irrigation project undertaken around the turn of the 20th century. Farmers here grow apples, peaches, pears, cherries, and plums, as well as grapes for wine and hops for beer. The Yakima Valley produces more hops than anywhere else in the United States and more than two-thirds of Washington’s wine grapes, an industry worth nearly $5 billion.

And yet the sparsely vegetated ridges reveal the climatological truth of this place: that under normal conditions, the Cascades are a good enough goalie to prevent all but a fraction of western Washington’s wetness from slipping past them, and the presence of even the smallest amount of water is broadcast in bright pops of color. The draws and gullies appear as gashes of green, yellow, pink, and white, as if someone took a landscape painting, folded it in two, and stuffed the canvas into a crevice.

I take in the view from the cab of a 2016 Toyota Tacoma hurtling eastward on Interstate 90. Jason Henry, ASLA, a principal at the Seattle-based Berger Partnership, is driving. We’re on our way to Yakima, a sprawled-out town of roughly 100,000 people, where Berger Partnership recently completed the landscape for the headquarters of the Washington Fruit & Produce Company, a family-owned grower founded in 1916. Although Henry has lived in Seattle since 1996, the landscape architect has a deep connection to the Yakima Valley. His mother was born in Selah, just north of Yakima, and as a child, he spent summers at his aunt and uncle’s ranch outside the city, exploring and fishing and occasionally helping out in the family orchards. He still has cousins in the fruit industry.

The building’s architect, Brett Baba of Graham Baba Architects, also based in Seattle, grew up in Yakima as well. Baba had worked with Berger Partnership on a large public market in downtown Wenatchee, two hours north of Yakima, and he knew Henry had an extensive knowledge of eastern Washington’s native ecology. He thought he would be “good at curating a landscape that would be reminiscent of the greater landscape of the valley and the river and the basalt cliffs around the building.”

From the top of the berm, the orchard-inspired planting plan is visible. Photo by Kevin Scott.

Unlike the company’s orchards, Washington Fruit & Produce’s new corporate office—a low-slung, barnlike building that recently won a 2018 Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects—features a landscape of almost all native plant species, selected by Berger Partnership from the surrounding river valleys, a microcosm of the region’s varied ecologies. “We took the whole area from the bottom of the riparian zone all the way to the top of the hill and compressed that,” Henry explains. The landscape celebrates the native ecology of eastern Washington while also creating a quiet cloister within the barren hinterlands of Washington Fruit & Produce’s packing facility, a 90-acre conglomeration of large, gray, climate-controlled warehouses located on the far north end of Yakima.

In both principle and practice, the design is a stark departure from the suburban-style landscapes that dominate the city, where wide blacktop roads are lined by denuded vegetation and signs for places like the Sun Country Inn, Road Runner Deli Mart, and Waffles Caffe. “I could’ve put down more red lava rock and blue spruce and called it good, and you see plenty of that,” Henry says as we pull into town. “Or we could’ve just done all lawn. You see tons of that, too.”

If Baba and Henry share an affinity for Yakima more generally, the building site offered little in the way of character. Comprising two flat, undeveloped acres of floodplain, the site had views of the adjacent warehouses, a busy highway interchange, and the blank back wall of the Yakima Cinema. Its one redeeming quality was its proximity to the confluence of the Naches and Yakima Rivers and, beyond the interchange to the north, a view to the basalt hills that are part of the Yakima Ridge. Rick Plath, the president of Washington Fruit & Produce, gave the design team free rein over the headquarters building’s orientation. It was quickly determined that the building, which provides 16,500 square feet of office and meeting space for roughly 50 of the company’s 2,000 employees, should face north toward the ridge.

To control views and screen the surrounding industrial facilities—Plath’s main request—the team wrapped the building with a 12- to 14-foot-high, wildflower-strewn landform. The berm, or rather a series of three, the longest of which is 700 linear feet, almost completely encloses the L-shaped building and helps choreograph the arrival sequence. Employees and visitors take a long, tree-lined drive from River Road, south of the company’s property, past the headquarters building—which is glimpsed from the drive through a strategically placed opening—and loop around to a parking lot on the north side of the property. From the parking lot, a second gap in the berm, punctuated by two monolithic yet human-scaled, poured-concrete walls, frames the building. The main entrance is accessed over a wide, wooden boardwalk that bisects a 20,000-square-foot courtyard planted to mimic the ecology of a streambank, with stands of paper birch (Betula papyrifera) and emergent wetland species such as Juncus effusus.

From the south, the building is largely hidden, disappearing into the landscape. Photo by Kevin Scott.

To provide employees with near constant views of the landscape, the building, whose form was inspired by an abandoned barn that Plath took Baba to see, features extensive glazing on its north-facing facade. Like a barn that’s been pulled apart, the building’s sloping roofline visually—and, in places, physically—continues across the courtyard to a small, stand-alone structure, which houses a lunchroom with a long farmer’s table. Topped by a green roof that blends seamlessly into the adjacent landform, the lunchroom seems to be carved out of an existing hillside, or else is in the process of being overtaken by nature. The sensation is heightened by the fact that the courtyard’s river birch and quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) pop up above the building’s roofline. “If you’ve ever seen derelict old barns with trees sprouting up through them—it’s almost like a contemporary adaptation of that,” Henry says.

In contrast with the more arid environment of the berm—whose north and south faces are planted with different seed mixes to accommodate their distinct solar exposures—Berger Partnership worked to make the courtyard reminiscent of eastern Washington’s richly vegetated riparian areas. “When you go into the river corridors in Yakima, they definitely have an almost oasis-like feel, where you come out of desert and under the tree canopy,” Henry says. The team, which included Stephanie Woirol; Brad McGuirt, ASLA; and Magdalena Hogness (now an urban designer with the City of Seattle), also wanted to highlight and celebrate a native ecology that is often overlooked. Over the past century, as transportation infrastructure was built in eastern Washington, it was often built in the floodplain. The Yakima River, which Henry and I followed for 25 miles on our way to Yakima through a steep-walled, serpentine canyon, is traced curve for curve by a highway on one side and a railroad on the other.

“That nearshore habitat,” Henry says, “it’s the first thing to go.” And yet riparian species such as quaking aspen are hugely important to the overall ecosystem, especially in terms of bird habitat. Given Washington Fruit & Produce’s proximity to two major waterways, Berger Partnership saw an opportunity to help stem the loss of that habitat. The team devised a palette of native species including Carex aquatilis and Cornus sericea ‘Farrow’ to create a highly textured, seasonally changing understory. The designers were discerning in which species to throw into the mix. “We were mainly shooting for that herbaceous layer right at the river’s edge,” Henry says. “We definitely didn’t want to overpower it with feather reed grass. [We] wanted to do things that people weren’t as used to seeing.”

Other species were too familiar. “I can’t tell you how many projects we’ve done in the past where it’s like, ‘Wait, you want to use quaking aspen? That’s a weed,’” Henry says. “Getting out of that psychology is a tough thing. And that’s worldwide. That’s not just a local phenomenon.” Plath, though he embraced the idea of re-creating the native ecology, initially had a similar reaction. So Henry took Plath to Cowiche Creek, a tributary of the Yakima River that flows just west of the company’s headquarters, to show him how abundant aspens are in riparian areas and to discuss how important they are to the ecosystem. Plath eventually signed off on the tree, and once the landscape was installed, he and the rest of his team got a crash course in how to care for these native species. “Anytime we had questions about how to prune a tree, we would ask [Jason] because an ornamental tree and a fruit tree are pruned completely differently. If you had an apple pruner come in and work on your trees [at home], they would turn out terribly,” Plath says, laughing. The biggest challenge, Henry says, was convincing the crew that, for certain plants, they didn’t need to do anything. “They wanted inherently to do stuff,” he says.

Image courtesy Berger Partnership.

If the courtyard’s plant palette celebrates native species, its spatial configuration honors the company’s agricultural history. Both the architecture, with its barnlike form and exposed timber posts (a reference to the region’s ubiquitous V-shaped trellises), and the landscape architecture are explicit in their agrarian references. Berger Partnership arranged the courtyard’s emergent wetland species in neat, orthogonal, orchard-like rows, and aligned trees and boulders with the building’s column grid. Interspersed are crushed-stone paths, and the wooden boardwalk is lined with delicate Elfin thyme.

The most overt reference to fruit cultivation is the outdoor shade structure, which repurposes orchard trellises and agricultural shade cloth to protect the parking area from summertime sun. Shade cloth is a type of fabric used to protect apples from hail and excessive sun, which causes undesirable spotting. It’s typically suspended from trellises made out of canted wooden posts and metal wire. The idea to employ the same system on site came to Henry after the project was already under construction when, on his way to Yakima, he noticed field-workers rigging up shade cloth in an orchard. It was an easy sell, Henry says, because the structure used off-the-shelf materials and was something Washington Fruit & Produce could erect itself. All the designers had to do was tweak the dimensions of the parking lot to accommodate the spacing required by the trellises. For such a late addition, the shade structure has an inordinate effect on the quality of the space. Besides its express function, the shade cloth’s golden color and rippling form serve as a dramatic punctuation mark to the long, circuitous arrival sequence.

A number of details were refined—or removed—throughout the design and construction process. For instance, the courtyard originally included a water feature. Early drawings show the boardwalk floating over a dark blue plane of water. It would have been a much more literal interpretation of a reconstructed riparian area, but the water feature fell victim to the value engineering phase. So Berger Partnership found other ways to create the illusion of water, interspersing the wetland plantings with long, flat basalt boulders sourced from Herke Rock, a local aggregate supplier. Each stone was individually selected and tagged by the team.

Oriented to the north and wrapped in glass, the building gives occupants views back to the Yakima Ridge. Photo by Kevin Scott.

Without the water feature, the boardwalk, already a part of the design, became all the more important for the way it suggested crossing a bog or wetland, and the landscape architects resisted pressure to replace the cumaru wood with concrete, which would have been less expensive. (The tropical hardwood is the only nonlocal material in the project; everything else came from Yakima and was installed or built by Yakima-based companies.) In the end, Henry is glad the water feature was value-engineered out. The final design is more naturalistic, and given that most of the site’s stormwater is channeled into the courtyard, it becomes a kind of seasonal wetland. “It’s still suggestive of water, but it doesn’t physically have the water or the concerns and constraints around it,” he says.

Berger Partnership also initially specified rammed earth for the retaining walls that run alongside the northernmost berms, each of which is approximately 125 feet long. When the team couldn’t find a local contractor competent with the process, they reverted to an earthen-brown-colored poured concrete, the horizontal boards of the form evoking rammed earth’s layered look. Regardless of the material, the wall needed to be at least 24 inches thick to achieve the monumentality the designers wanted. Because this was beyond the structural requirement, to reduce costs, the walls slim down to just 12 inches 10 feet from the entrance where their depth is no longer visible.

The design team remained hands-on throughout construction. As the berm was being formed, Henry and Baba set up platforms within the building’s footprint to check the views. They found that the movie theater was still slightly visible to the south and instructed the crew to add more soil, raising the berm by more than a foot, and Berger Partnership also added about two dozen more trees to the south side of the building. Other aspects were out of the team’s control. The day after the berm was planted, Yakima got several inches of snow. Henry thought, “Well, I guess the seed’s not coming up till next year.” And yet just a few months later, the berm was verdant. “It is astounding how fast stuff grows over there,” he says.

Three years in, Henry has few complaints. Walking atop the southernmost berm, our footfalls releasing the nose-tickling scent of yarrow and sage, he says he’s disappointed not to see more arrowleaf balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata). He was sure it would do well. It still may. “It’s just harder to get it established. It takes a while,” he says. Henry is particularly pleased with the success of the green roof, which uses a subsurface drip irrigation mat—in which emitter tubes are embedded in a fabric of polypropylene “fleece”—to apply water more evenly across the planted area. It was Henry’s first time using the product, and he’s happy it’s performing well.

Large slabs of basalt came from a local quarry. Photo by Kevin Scott.

Baba says he was astounded at how quickly the courtyard landscape matured. “It creates this feeling of being outdoors when you’re sitting inside looking through the glass.” He’s right. From inside the office lobby, looking north toward the courtyard and the shade cloth canopy and the ridge beyond, I’m struck by how secluded the building feels. There is no hint of the packing facilities a stone’s throw away, no sense that I am at the edge of an industrial park. The dynamic, almost electric relationship between the orthogonal planting plan and the rough, biomorphic forms of the plant species—the scabby, curling bark of the birch, the sedge’s flowers bursting like flak—creates an endlessly appealing environment, one that is neither too manicured nor too bald in its simulation of a riverine ecosystem.

Perhaps it is precisely the courtyard’s fantasy, its impossibility as a naturally occurring condition in the world, that makes it so compelling an object of study. It’s not a mirage, however. The landscape has become a sylvan retreat for workers and wildlife alike. Although no one is conducting official counts, Henry says he’s seen plenty of birds and insects on the property. Plath has noticed a snake or two and surmises that raccoons sneak over from the river at night. On the day we visit, it’s evident that something—perhaps a ground squirrel—has been burrowing on the berm near the edge of the green roof. For Henry and the staff at Berger Partnership, there are ecological opportunities on every type of site. “Sometimes it’s easy to say, ‘well, it’s not going to make a difference if I just do this one project,’” Henry says. “But then if you get enough people to do it, you’ve really improved some of these areas.”

Project Credits

CLIENT WASHINGTON FRUIT & PRODUCE COMPANY, YAKIMA, WASHINGTON. LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT BERGER PARTNERSHIP, SEATTLE. ARCHITECT GRAHAM BABA ARCHITECTS, SEATTLE. CIVIL ENGINEER MEIER ARCHITECTURE • ENGINEERING, KENNEWICK, WASHINGTON. LIGHTING DESIGNER BRIAN HOOD LIGHTING DESIGN, SEATTLE. CONTRACTOR ARTISAN INC. GENERAL CONTRACTORS, YAKIMA, WASHINGTON. LANDSCAPE CONTRACTOR ELEVATION CONTRACTING, ELLENSBURG, WASHINGTON. IRRIGATION DRAGONFLY IRRIGATION DESIGN, SEATTLE.

Timothy A. Schuler writes about design, ecology, and the natural environment. He lives in Honolulu.