Coming home to the Ching Garden

The Ching Garden today

By Pamela Ching-Bunge and Kathleen Lumiere

For years after her parents’ home on Greenwood Avenue North was sold, Pamela Ching-Bunge avoided the street, though she lived close by. “It was too painful to witness the destruction of my parents’ dream,” she said. Then, in 2020, came a phone call describing another dream of a community garden to honor Asian Americans on the site. “At first, I was in disbelief, then elated with tears.”

On Saturday, October 3, 2026 the Ching Garden at 16034 Greenwood Avenue North opened to the public, and Pam stood on a stump in her parents’ old yard and told their story to more than a hundred people.

Joe and Jennie Ching were both born and raised in Hawai’i. Joe, a Chinese American, enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor and learned to cook in the Army. Jennie, a Japanese American and a U.S. citizen, spent the war incarcerated in the Arizona desert. They married after the war and came to Seattle, where Joe became the first executive chef at Canlis. 

In 1957 they found the house they wanted in Shoreline and learned that the color of their skin disqualified them from a federal mortgage. Joe’s employer, Peter Canlis, bought the property and sold it to them, on the condition that the neighbors on both sides agreed to an Asian family next door.

The Chings’ answer was a luau. Everyone was invited, and more than the invitees came. There were hula dancers and musicians, and a kalua pig roasted in a pit dug in the yard. “I can still hear my dad say, Eat! Eat! Eat!” 

Pam told the crowd. “My parents didn’t consider themselves to be activists fighting inequality and discrimination. They took the gentler path to achieve change: open your hearts and home, and share generously.”

The land itself went from garbage dump to baseball field to the garden that Ed Hume featured on Gardening in America. Pam remembers being eight years old and clearing the hardpacked lot. 

“Endless weeks of pitching rocks into buckets. My dream then was, if I could only get one penny for every rock I pitched.” 

Joe grew vegetables for the family and for anyone who stopped by, and experimented with organic methods long before they were popular. Jennie grew flowers for ikebana. Joe died in 2005. Jennie stayed until 2013, when the property was sold to developers and the blackberries moved in.

Pam closed with what she imagines her parents would say today. “Be generous and share the bounty with all.” “Don’t wait for change to come to you. Make your own path.” And, “Don’t forget Dad’s favorite fertilizer, buckets of smelly liquid fish fertilizer.” 

Then she said what the garden has become for her. “Nowadays, I love coming home to work in the garden, feeling and watching the garden come back to life, remembering my parents’ advice, and meeting truly wonderful people.”

Kathleen Lumiere welcomed the crowd

Kathleen Lumiere, who first proposed the garden in a Shoreline Area News editorial, welcomed the crowd. She asked everyone who had ever pulled a blackberry, hauled a tarp, reviewed a grant application, or pushed a wheelbarrow to raise a hand, and then asked everyone else to look around at the people who built this garden. 

Sean Catanese, a Diggin’ Shoreline board member, told how a public radio story about the garden brought him to his first work party. He came, he said, to work beside his daughter, who planted the squash in the giving garden. “This garden is thriving,” he said, “because ordinary people chose to care.”

The purchase took three years. King County Conservation Futures funded it over three grant cycles, with steady support from County Councilmember Rod Dembowski, and when the appraisal came in above what the grants covered, the Canlis family provided a bridge loan, as Peter Canlis had once stepped in for the Chings. 

In December 2023 the GROW land trust, responsible for most of the P-Patches in the Seattle area, became the owner. 

Diggin’ Shoreline, an all-volunteer Shoreline nonprofit, took on developing and tending the garden and began Saturday work parties in January 2024. More than 250 people have since tended every square foot of it under the guidance of horticulturist Derek Fowler. 

Grants from the King Conservation District, the City of Shoreline, and the Northwest Horticultural Society, together with plants and support from King County Parks, Sky Nursery, and other nurseries, have funded and furnished the past year’s work. Shoreline College provides parking and partnership. 

Students from Lakeside’s LEEP summer program have come every year, and a volunteer crew from Heritage Bank planted the Heritage Bed. Since March, nearly 300 trees and plants have gone in beside the Chings’ heirloom apples, Asian pears, figs, grapes, and persimmons.

Saturday was a celebration for the community as much as an opening, and Diggin’ Shoreline’s board and volunteers put the day together. In addition to tours and squash harvesting, children had activities of their own beside the hügelkultur troughs, where this summer’s pak choi, mizuna, and komatsuna went to the Shoreline Share Pantry. People left with squash and cover crop seeds, and packets of dried apples and Asian pears.

Past neighbors brought stories. A man who grew up a few houses down described the long open lots where the neighborhood children gathered to play, which explains the baseballs and marbles that volunteers keep turning up when they dig. A high school friend of Pam’s recognized the Desert King fig; the start for it came from her family’s tree in Seward Park some sixty years ago.

The Ching Garden is an Asian American heritage garden and a food forest, and it will be a work in progress for years. Visitors on Saturday admired the Serenity Garden corner, the first of the quiet vignettes planned throughout. The upper garden, where the house once stood, accessible paths, and permanent signage about history, culture, and plants will come in later phases as grants and donations allow.

The garden, located at 16034 Greenwood Ave N, Shoreline, is open every day during daylight hours. The new plantings are small, so please stay on the wood-chipped paths, and expect some areas to be fenced off for construction. For large events, people are welcome to park in the Shoreline College Visitor Parking lot a block to the west.

Work parties meet Saturday mornings, and both beginners and experienced gardeners are welcome! Tools are provided; bring gloves and wear sturdy shoes. Sign up here

Diggin’ Shoreline accepts donations for the garden at digginshoreline.org

Like the Chings, we welcome you to the garden!