DUNGENESS – The before: Motorists pulled up to Catherine and Tom Mix’s suburban house, honked their horns, thrust $5 bills out their car windows and zoomed away with fistfuls of dahlias.
The after: Moms, dads, grandmas, grandkids, brides and grooms come out to a 24-acre farm to frolic, or just marry, among rows of sweet peas and peonies, now and then looking up at the Olympic Mountains.
This is the story of The Cutting Garden, a dream that unfolded in a hay field north of Sequim.
The seed of that dream, which germinated back in 1999 in Catherine’s mind, has just produced a new bloom on the cover of Fine Gardening magazine.
Her vision
Let’s go back, first, to the day nearly 11 years ago when Catherine was looking out over her recently purchased land with Bentley Gardens designer Sharon Nyenhuis.
“What’s your vision?” Nyenhuis asked.
Catherine, a former Boeing Co. computer programmer who had that little dahlia garden at her home in Issaquah before she and Tom “retired” to Sequim, had a sweeping vision.
She’s wild about color, loves variety and was starting a new life as a flower farmer.
“We were drunk on free time,” Catherine said of that period immediately after retirement.
So, she told Nyenhuis, she wanted this place to grace the cover of Fine Gardening magazine.
Next came the work, the weeding — and beginning in 2000, weddings in the glorious display garden at the end of Dahlia Llama lane.
Tom and Catherine have dahlias and llamas, plus a sense of humor, so they went through the Clallam County channels to name the farm access road that comes off of Woodcock Road just west of Sequim-Dungeness Way.
The Cutting Garden grew more popular each year as a wedding site, hitting a peak of 42 weddings in 2008.
Then the recession hit, hard, so that in 2009 there were just 17 nuptials here.
“We found out what we can survive on,” Catherine said of that drought.
This year, though, is looking lovelier, with 21 weddings booked for the May-through-September season, and the Mixes predict that in the weeks after Valentine’s Day proposals, they will see a few more reservations.
Christmas gift
At Christmas, however, they received a gift in the form of a phone call from Fine Gardening.
Their farm was chosen for the cover of the March-April issue, and inside the magazine there would be two articles full of Catherine’s advice about flower-growing and bouquet assembly.
The news came in dark December, six months after Fine Gardening associate editor Danielle Sherry had discovered Sequim.
She wanted to do a spread on cutting gardens, and the Internet led her to the Sequim business.
Sherry phoned Catherine and other Sequim business owners out of the blue to determine whether The Cutting Garden fit her story idea.
Then she visited, in June, at summer solstice — when the Mixes’ place is at the height of its hues.
So it probably wasn’t terribly difficult to find some decent photographs for the magazine.
What was hard, Catherine said, was choosing just a few flowers for the “cutting garden essentials” piece Sherry wanted her to write.
“The rudiments of the article were ‘your 10 to 12 must-haves.’ I have 200 must-haves. So these are my favorites in late June,” she said.
Among them are the giant white calla lily, “dreaming spires” Siberian iris, Pacific Giants delphinium, Elfin Pink penstemon and the Purpleicious speedwell, a “searing violet” flower Catherine said is worth planting for the name alone.
A second article takes readers through the bouquet process, step by step, Catherine-style.
“I like voluptuous, over the top,” she said. To her mind, a mix of colors and textures, “little lacy things and strong-statement flowers” make it great.
Art, horses
Catherine is also an artist whose pastels and watercolors have appeared in local galleries.
And Tom, an engineer who put in 32 years at Boeing, runs a side horse-boarding business on the farm, and works alongside his wife on all manner of projects.
This spring those include building a second greenhouse that will be a gift shop in summer and fall and a warm place for seedlings in winter.
“I’m working harder now than I did at Boeing,” said Tom, who is 65.
He does volunteer work on the Olympic Discovery Trail in addition to his full-time-plus job at the farm.
“We didn’t retire. We . . . reoriented,” added Catherine, 59.
This labor, it’s clear, feeds their love of the land. Each summer, the Mixes welcome visitors from everywhere, people thirsty for open space and air.
“It’s great to see people come out and thoroughly enjoy themselves,” said Tom. “You’ll see the grandkids out there after they’ve cut a big bouquet, with big grins on their faces.”
Even the weddings aren’t unduly stressful, Catherine said.
“We’ve never met Bridezilla. I think when people decide to have an outdoor wedding, they understand that they’re not going to have control over everything,” as they might try to do in a traditional indoor setting.
Matrimony at The Cutting Garden comes in a variety of prices.
An eight-hour Saturday wedding and reception package ranges from $1,350 in May to $2,700 June through September. Fees are lower for other days of the week and for five- or three-hour packages.
About 60 percent of those who hold weddings here come from the greater Seattle area, while the rest are local, Catherine said.
She and Tom spend considerable time marketing The Cutting Garden to engaged couples, and to families who might enjoy a day of picking flowers.
This place enchants people not just with its visual splendor, but also with its sense of peace, the Mixes believe.
Recently, a visitor turned to Tom and said, “I just heard a bird fly.” That whoosh of wings just wasn’t audible in the city.
Back in Issaquah, their little dahlia garden attracted people who just wanted “the product,” Tom remembered. “Out here, people want the experience.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.