Slices of Many Lives at Danny Woo Gardens

9/20/15 Kobe Terrace Park

9/20/15 A few chickens cooped up in Danny Woo
Gardens.

The Danny Woo Community Gardens in the International District offer a fascinating cross-section of urban Seattle. First there’s the interesting mix of architecture – new, boxy apartment buildings stand in the same line of sight as the stately Smith Tower. Scrappy-looking vegetation grows right next to tidy gardens and stands of trees that make you forget you are still in downtown Seattle. Gardeners weeding their P-patches look slightly askance at homeless men who, in turn, look askance at the sketchers occupying their favorite benches. And then there are the chickens (which I sketched last year, too). It’s an ideal sketch outing location for Urban Sketchers Seattle because no matter what your subject interest – architecture, trees, plants, people, fowl – you can find it there.

9/20/15 Smith Tower

My favorite sketch of the morning is the one at the top of the page – the stone lantern (a 200-year-old gift from Seattle’s Japanese sister city, Kobe) marking tiny Kobe Terrace Park, which is your reward if you climb the gardens’ terraced hillside. A Japanese maple was just beginning to turn behind the lantern. Asleep nearby on the stone wall was a homeless man, covered in blankets.

9/20/15 Trees in Danny Woo Gardens