clark_lewies_Gorge16.pdf
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Northwest Seasonal Cuisine
ON THE WATER 509-219-0097 130 Cascade Avenue Stevenson, Washington
Melissa Elliott (above) has established more than 130 acres of organic landscapes in her 25 years as a landscape designer and contractor. She works to create residential and commercial landscapes in the Gorge and the Portland metro area that support bees and other pollinators.
courses and began attending conferences on colony collapse. She traveled to England and France to work with people who were studying the problem of the disappearing bees. “They were working on bee loss way before we were,” Elliott says. She even became a beekeeper herself. “It reinvigorated and reinforced my work,” says Elliott, who began calling her company Melissa Bees. Even more so than before, she recognized the need for organic, flowering oases to support bees. “For years I had gardened organically on both residential and commercial properties, ripping out lawns and parking strips and replacing them with a profusion of flowering plants, supplanting privacy fences with hedgerows and inter-planting vegetables,” she says. With the widespread loss of bees, Elliott knew her landscaping methods were important beyond simply their aesthetics. “In my experience, life has a way of showing
up when we create a more interesting place for it,” Elliott says. “Layers, color, texture, tangle, scent, berries and seeds are more provocative to living things than a flat, boring and often poisonous lawn or monoculture plantings.” Along with attracting birds, frogs and butterflies, she knew these landscapes also bring honeybees. When the documentary film Vanishing of the Bees came out in 2009, detailing the struggle of commercial beekeepers to keep their colonies alive, Elliott knew she was in a unique position to advocate for it. The film “galvanized” people, according to Elliott, bringing the plight of the honeybee to the attention of Americans. “It was a catalyst for me to share my boots-on-theground knowledge of how to care for residential and commercial landscapes in such a way to help both honeybees and native bees,” she says. Along with creating bee-friendly landscapes, she began
THE GORGE MAGAZINE : SPRING 2016
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