This year, Washington legislators approved a proposal to create an eastern Washington memorial on the state Capitol Campus in Olympia.
A committee that is creating the exhibit presented its plan to a state design committee last week.
“I was very excited about this proposal and this legislation. But to try to get plants from eastern Washington to thrive here in western Washington did take a lot of thought. The exposure and the watering and the siting and the compatibility," said Dr. Brent Chapman, the state horticulturist leading the project.
Chapman says the display will include trees and shrubs native to the east side. He says the plot for the exhibit was picked specifically so that it could be watered differently than areas with vegetation native to a wetter climate.
"The beauty of that is they will need water the first two or three years or summers to get established and then, probably after the third year, we can start to back off on the watering quantity and frequency. Then I could imagine, after four or five years, it may not need to be watered at all," Chapman said.
He says the memorial will also feature five basalt columns, similar to those commonly found in eastern Washington. It will also have benches where people can sit down and read about what they’re seeing. He says the goal is to begin preparing the site for planting in November and to have it ready when legislators return to Olympia in early January.
The work to create the exhibit comes from an account created specifically for the project. It’s funded mostly, if not fully, by private donations.
The memorial will join a variety of others on the campus in Olympia.
