They are neighbourly sorts of places, houseboat communities. It is probably the maritime connection: one vessel should always go to the aid of another. But, as in any neighbourhood, there are frictions and in one of the best-established houseboat settlements around the world, on Lake Union, in Seattle, US, a wider conflict has concentrated around gardening.
To understand the dispute, you have to appreciate something of the history of houseboats. Like most floating communities around the world – such as those long established in the Netherlands or the UK or elsewhere in North America, in Portland, Oregan, and Sausalito, California – the first Seattle houseboaters were poor. There have been houseboats on the lake since the 1890s, and, says Jeri Callahan, a houseboat resident and the author of Staying Afloat, a chronicle of the community, “it was cheap housing then; you might say it was one step above homeless. Lumbermen, fishermen – folks good with their hands – could always find some cedar logs floating in the lake and they would lash them together and build a simple shelter against the storms.”
In time, these working class residents were joined by assorted artists, students and adventurous retirees. The municipality regarded their homes as an eyesore and made various attempts to evict them but “this motley crew of I’ll-march-to-my-own-drummer folks”, as Callahan describes them, banded together in response. They connected their vessels to sewerage, renamed them “floating homes” and, shockingly, asked to be subjected to property tax – thereby transforming themselves into more or less upstanding, and immoveable, residents.
But no sooner had the houseboaters begun to enjoy the luxury of permanence than they faced another peril, in the form of gentrification. In the past few decades, the Lake Union houseboats have become such desirable properties for Microsoft millionaires – the company is headquartered nearby – other time-poor professionals and, this time, wealthy retirees that a mooring site alone now costs as much as $700,000, never mind the cost of the boat.
And just as the old-time houseboaters were once described by a city official as inhabiting the “cesspool of Seattle”, they now accuse the recent, moneyed residents of wanting to create a “floating suburbia”. Indeed, among the 500 or so dwellings, some of the new houses – great, square structures built on ferro-cement-and-styrofoam floats rather than log rafts, and complete, in some cases, with fluttering US flags – do look incongruous, or perhaps pointless, on the water.
When they have room for greenery at all, these architecturally designed palaces often have built-in planters or neat roof-top gardens, which are in stark contrast to the lush, anarchic plantings that in some cases threaten to overwhelm the originally strung-together shacks of the earlier houseboaters. It has set the stage for conflict, which in Callahan’s case has come in the form of a retired admiral and his wife who have moved on to her dock.
“They’re lovely folks, just lovely,” she says, “and they’re retired military. We don’t want to prettify our dock, we don’t want to pay for a landscape architect to beautify our flowers but the admiral’s wife – they’re lovely people! – doesn’t like the helter-skelter nature of our planting; she wants it to be organised. She’s got on the planting committee and she’s got all these grand ideas to make it more suburban. She’s the admiral’s wife and she’s used to getting what she wants!”
Part of what she objects to, it seems, is the habit of one long-standing resident, Bob Lilly, of leaving plants and sacks of fertiliser on the shared dock space. But Lilly might simply be short of time. An aptly named horticulturalist, he looks after the multitudinous potplants of many of his neighbours, in addition to his other gardening work.
On most of the boats, he tells me, he has planted “wild gardens of rare and unusual plants. Seattle isn’t very warm but all the red-end light bounces off the lake. So, even though we don’t perceive it, there’s a lot more light here for plants.” That means he can grow species such as the Australian tea tree bush, South African restios and tender subtropicals such as the cinnamon vine that would not normally thrive in the city.
“I also do a lot of lilies,” he says, “mostly oriental and trumpet types. I don’t do much with woodland plants because they don’t like the extra light and heat.” But some edible plants grow well, within plucking distance of the kitchen. “Beans are pretty successful but tomatoes are best. I’ve planted a squash or two just for fun and one year a watermelon. Herbs do really well; pretty much all Mediterranean species thrive because of the light.”
Plants dry out quickly on the decks but the solution is simply to lower a pail over the side. “A durable person could probably even drink the lakewater,” Lilly says; it is certainly safe for swimming. Frequent watering is also the solution to the wind gusts that threaten to topple the pots overboard: it keeps them weighed down.
Pots are, by necessity, the houseboat gardener’s mainstay (although not in every case: whole barges among the houseboats off Reeds Wharf, in London, have been planted with fruit trees and formal box hedges). Some of the Seattle houseboats might look crowded with containers but in fact this is just typical of the floating homeowner’s habit of maximising limited outside space. The plants also tend to be meticulously cared for when space is at such a premium: there is no room for neglect.
We might have a lot to learn from the houseboater’s economy. I can think of no better place to watch the sea level rise than from the deck of a houseboat. The Netherlands, increasingly fearful of inundation should its dykes fail, has perhaps taken the concept of living afloat further than any other country. One Dutch engineer, Ties Rijcken, has described to me his vision of whole purpose-built floating neighbourhoods, complete with garden pontoons. It could be the future – hopefully one in which the all-in-the-same-boat spirit that Callahan assures me endures in Seattle would also prevail.
