Danny Woo Garden and Children's Garden

620 South Main Street, across from Maynard Ave South

The Danny Woo International District Community Garden is a special urban park in the heart of downtown Seattle. Located adjacent to the City of Seattle’s Kobe Terrace Park, the Danny Woo Community Garden makes up part of 1.5 acres of the largest green space in Seattle’s Chinatown/International District (C/ID). The steeply terraced garden is comprised of nearly 100 plots, tended by about 70 elderly Asian gardeners. The garden is an important place where low-income gardeners can socialize, get exercise and raise vegetables that reflect their cultural foods of choice: bok choy, bittermelon, daikon, and watercress among others.

The following grants support the Garden program:

• Schiff Foundation (Children’s Garden Educational Program): supplies for cooking healthy foods from the garden

• City of Seattle, Department of Neighborhoods 2012 Small & Simple Grant: repair of walls and stairways

• Rainier Valley Eats! through United Way of King County: support for AppleCorps, an Americorps position facilitated through a partnership with Solid Ground, to staff this urban agriculture outreach program

With the help of seed funding from the City of Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods, United Way’s Rainier Valley Eats Grant, and from individual donors; what started as an experimental Children’s Garden in 2009 has expanded and grown. Now, the Children’s Garden Educational Program is blossoming!

The Children’s Garden first began by offering summertime gardening experiences to children and youth from the neighborhood. Now students from local educational institutions-The Denise Louie Education Center, Bailey Gatzert Elementary School, and the Puget Sound Community School-also have an opportunity to learn in the garden Since 2009, over 140 local students have learned about sustainable gardening practices, urban ecologies, environmental stewardship, and animal care. Nutritional education has increasingly become an important part of the Children’s Garden program, and today youth and young children learn how to grow, prepare, cook, and eat healthy foods.

Generous support from the Schiff Foundation is providing kid-friendly cookware, portable tables and chairs, and re-usable eating utensils. Soon we will expand the Children’s Garden Educational Program by building a permanent outdoor kitchen and classroom through a project called the “The Neighborhood Cookery: Cultivating Community.” To learn more about how you can help with this project, contact Tom Im, Community Planner at 206.624.1802 x17 or tim@interimicda.org

. The Danny Woo Community Garden is a place where youth and elders connect to the land and to each other. This intergenerational component is a unique opportunity for immigrant elderly gardeners, most of whom do not speak English, to both teach and learn from the children and youth who are learning to garden through the Children’s Garden Educational Program. By incorporating a strong intergenerational learning component, the Danny Woo Community Garden is helping to spread information about the relationship between the health of our urban environment and healthy lifestyles choices for people of all ages.

In existence for over 35 years, each year the Danny Woo Community Garden relies on volunteers and donations to help maintain the garden’s vibrancy and to address basic safety needs like crumbling infrastructure. If you’re interested in finding out how you can help preserve this unique green space, please contact Elizabeth Gray, 206.624.1802 x31 or egray@interimicda.org for more information.

The Danny Woo International District Community Garden is a special urban park in the heart of downtown Seattle, and the largest green space in the Chinatown/International District. The 1.5-acre garden provides community gardening space, picnic benches, public art, and walking trails. InterIm CDA manages this urban space, coordinating hundreds of volunteers every year to maintain and improve the Danny Woo Garden for everyone to enjoy.The Danny Woo Garden is located on the corner of Maynard Ave. and Main St.

The steeply terraced garden, surrounded with the lush greenery of bamboo and trees, is home to more than 100 community garden plots. Here elderly Asian gardeners tend to vegetables rarely seen in the typical grocery store, but which reflect their native lands: bok choy, bittermelon, daikon, and watercress. And younger generations of community gardeners experiment with plum trees, strawberries, beans, and herbs.

Residents come to plant summer vegetables and flowers, visitors and tourists come to connect to an urban green space. Named after a member of the Woo family that has leased the property to InterIm CDA since 1975, the garden is uniquely tied to the history of the Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean and other Asian and Pacific Islander immigrants who helped make Seattle the city it is today. Find out more about the history of this unique urban park.

Read the History of the Danny Woo Garden