Take a stroll through Fort Vancouver’s formal garden and breathe in the essence of a living history.

From lavender and leeks to lamb’s ears and lemon balm, it’s an historically accurate sampling of the garden fare that flourished during the fort’s heyday in the 1840s.

Rick Edwards, a park ranger at the Fort Vancouver National Historical Site, wouldn’t have it any other way. After all, this is where William Bruce, head gardener for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s trading post, once snipped sage and harvested tomatoes.

Edwards, the fort’s period garden coordinator, dons 19th-century clothing frequently throughout the year as he portrays the Scottish Bruce, who oversaw the nine-acre formal garden until the late 1840s.

“This is a great job,” said Edwards, 48, who started at the fort as a volunteer. “It gives us the opportunity to make history come alive.”

And he’s been doing just that for the past 15 years. Edwards and other employees of the National Park Service — as well as some 100 volunteers — transport visitors back to the year 1845 when the fort was the fur trade capital of the Pacific.

Wearing period costumes and demonstrating the work of carpenters, coopers, traders and clerks, they provide a first-hand glimpse of life inside the 15-foot-high walls of the trading post that operated from 1825 to 1860.

Visitors warm up to the mood as the smithy fans the coals in the blacksmith shop and pounds on red-hot horseshoes. The bake house must have been just as hot for the four men who worked long hours baking bread and hardtack sea biscuits at the two fire-brick ovens.

“It’s a compelling story, but it has to connect to some personal experience” of the visitor, said Edwards, who admits he never liked history in school. He enjoys finding a connection for students who tour the fort.

“I tell the high school students, ‘So it’s hard being a teen-ager,’” he said. “I tell the girls that if they lived here in the 1840s they would be married and raising a family. I tell the boys that they would be working to support the family. Suddenly, they see whether they should go a movie on Friday in a new light.”

Edwards wears several hats at the fort, from ranger and gardener Bruce to staff photographer. Last year he served as a consultant for Steven Spielberg’s movie, “Amistad,” advising the set decorator on props.

“She called and asked what slaves would have eaten in 1839 and how would it have been packaged,” he said. “I told her, sea biscuits — flour and water baked to the consistency of a desktop — packed in barrels.”

Fort Vancouver sold the filmmakers 100 reproduction rum bottles and ink bottles, and Edwards rented them some of his personal garden tools from the period.

Passion for the garden

But of all the things Edwards does at the fort, “one of the things that is my passion is working the period garden,” he says.

“I’m just fascinated by what these people ate and how they grew it,” said Edwards, a 1967 graduate of Woodland High School.

He and a crew of 20 volunteers strive to keep the English garden historically accurate, which means no pesticides and no commercial fertilizers are used. Every vegetable, herb and flower in today’s one-acre garden dates to the 1840s. Back then, the garden supplied food and flowers for the 30 people living within the walls.

“People are amazed at the amount of flowers we are growing here,” Edwards says. “But rich English people grew flowers. By the 1840s, gardening was the fashionable thing for wealthy men to do.”

It was William Bruce’s job as head gardener at the fort to oversee landscape design, inform the kitchen staff when specific produce would be ripe, put together flower arrangements for the chief factor’s house and package vegetables that would travel with the gentlemen on excursions.

But head gardeners never got their hands dirty, adds Edwards, who uses many period tools to tend the garden. They always dressed formally, enjoying the same status as the homeowner. The head gardener was the only one allowed to smoke in the garden, and no one would think of picking a piece of fruit without his permission.

Reading and constant research are key to his job, says the ranger.

“I just love to take on new things and do stuff I don’t know anything about,” said Edwards, who studied graphic arts and photography at Clark College. In the late 60s and early 70s, he played bass guitar for Hank Rasco and the Wasted Rangers, Johnny and the Distractions and other area rock bands.

Later, he became a master gardener through Washington State University’s cooperative extension program. Over the years he has added visual touches to the garden of rectangular beds by designing the rose trellis, hops arbor and sundial that grace the landscape. He has created beds of different shapes and a meandering path through one of them.

“I want to distract you from the airplanes and the buildings over there,” he said over the constant roar of jetliners approaching the Portland airport. “I’m competing with the modern world.”

There are “tremendous stories to tell here,” said Edwards, standing among the herbs that flavored meals long ago. “If someone leaves here and wants to go check out a book to learn more, then we have won.”

RICK EDWARDS
Job: Park ranger at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.
Former job: Played bass for Hank Rasco and the Wasted Rangers and other rock groups
Quote: “The history here is a history of peace. There was a tremendous diversity of cultures and religious beliefs and (people) got along. Our driving force is to share it with others.”