NEWBERG, Ore. — Along Villa Road, in a stretch of city-engineered bioswale that once collected little besides clay and yellow grass, Corinne Tate has spent the past four years building something else entirely: a garden the whole neighborhood has claimed as its own.
Tate and her husband, Tom, moved into a standalone home owned by Friendsview, the Newberg retirement community, in 2022, after decades away from the area where Tate grew up on Chehalem Mountain. The home sat along a series of check dams — concrete-walled basins built to catch stormwater runoff — that Tate said were originally landscaped with dozens of varieties of trees and shrubs when Villa Road was rebuilt years earlier, based on renderings she found while researching the property before moving in.
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“It started there, but it wasn’t kept watered, so they all died,” Tate said. “Except for there’s a cedar tree out here that I think was probably part of the planting. That’s the only thing that was there when we moved in.”
What remained, she said, was dry grass and weeds — a contrast to the landscaped grounds at George Fox University and the Chehalem Aquatic Center nearby.
“It could be, it really could be beautiful if somebody would do something,” Tate said. “I always thought, well, somebody will do it. Well, nobody will do it unless someone does it. So I thought, OK, I’m the someone.”
Starting without asking
Tate began in 2022 with two beds flanking her driveway, intending to stop there. The rest, she said, she planned to leave to the city. But Newberg’s maintenance crews, short-staffed at the time, had already stopped tending the check dams along the road.
“They said, ‘You know, we are’ — I think at the time they said we’re five men short in the maintenance department,” Tate said. “They just couldn’t get employees, and so they had to let something go. That’s what they were letting go, was the maintaining of the drainage things.”
Tate said she never formally requested permission from the city before expanding the project, which now covers a series of beds running much of the length of her property along Villa Road. She finished the last of them, on the north side, in 2025.
“I really didn’t officially ask for permission,” Tate said. “I just started doing it.”
The beds sit in gravel drainage basins rather than soil, she said, meaning every plant requires a hand-dug hole amended with new soil before planting. A church friend donated hazelnut shells from their farm to help with ground cover, according to Friendsview.
Tate said the largest expense of the project was running water lines to the beds for a drip irrigation system — an investment she made after a first summer spent hand-watering for hours a day.
Every plant, she said, has to clear three requirements: deer resistance, drought tolerance and pollinator friendliness. She said there are deer that live in the Hess Creek bed area below the trestle. She tries to curb their appetites with a deer block and a daily apple, which does help. But, deer are always going to play by their own rules, she said.
A City of Blooms
Tate said part of her motivation came from a television segment about Castle Rock, Washington, a small city that pursued a beautification effort in partnership with America in Bloom, a national community improvement organization. She cited figures from her own notes on the project, saying the city’s downtown business vacancy rate fell from roughly 35 percent in 2012 to near-full occupancy after the initiative took hold.
“The whole community agreed to do it,” Tate said. “It was something they saw as a way to develop a personality, and now it’s a tourism destination.”
The garden — known locally as both “the Umbrella Garden” and “the Villa Garden,” she said — has become something of a landmark for people walking Villa Road. The garden received the Umbrella name after Tate placed patio umbrellas providing shades for the young plants last summer. While they are no longer needed, the name endures.
Tate said she rotates small hidden decorations, mostly secondhand finds from Goodwill, through the beds for children to spot, including a “Welcome to Jurassic Park” sign paired with hidden dinosaur figures and seasonal rubber ducks.
“I just love watching parents roll by with their kids,” Tate said. “You see them kind of pointing, and they’ll see the duck that’s down there. It’s a little moment of magic.
Tate said passersby sometimes ask whether the city pays her for the work. The entire project is self-funded, she said.
“We probably could have taken a couple really nice trips to Europe on what I’ve spent out there,” Tate said. “But it’s my gift to the community. This is important.”
There have been some unprompted community contributions. Tate said one visitor once handed her a $20 bill without prompting.
“He said, ‘Thank you for doing this,’” Tate said. “My first thought was, no, I can’t accept $20. And then I remembered — no, when someone wants to give you a gift, accept it graciously and thank them.”
Weathering floods and a fire
The check dams have flooded more than once. The blocks have flooded as recently as March 2025, and Tate described a separate downpour in which water cascaded from one bed into the next, scattering hazelnut shells and gravel pathways she had just installed.
“It cascaded over three blocks,” Tate said, describing how the overflow moved from bed to bed. “It spread them everywhere.”
The plants will help with that in the future, Tate said. Plants, soil, and thirsty root systems will absorb water as it passes, meaning that more water is held in each bed rather than quickly flowing down and flooding the ravine. Many of the plants, now in their third year when they hit rapid growth, will continue that job for the years to come.
The garden also sits near the Villa Road trestle that caught fire early on June 29, 2025, prompting evacuations and drawing a large emergency response, as Newsberg reported at the time. Tate, who lives next to the trestle, was among those evacuated and was quoted in Newsberg’s and other statewide news outlets’ initial coverage of the fire. Newberg-Dundee police later arrested two juveniles in connection with the blaze, according to Newsberg’s follow-up reporting.
Tate said the garden survived the fire without damage, and that when she posted about the incident afterward, many neighbors asked about the flowers before asking about the trestle.
“Is the garden okay?” she recalled people asking. “That was the first thing. They didn’t think about the trestle.”
Advice for other gardeners
Tate said her biggest lesson for anyone considering a similar project is patience with plant spacing.
“Don’t plant plants too close together,” Tate said. “There’s the adage of the first year they sleep, the second year they creep, and the third year they leap.”
She said the garden still gets relatively little formal recognition beyond word of mouth, but that seeing families stop to look, and children search for the hidden decorations, has been worth the ongoing cost and labor.
“It’s done my soul a lot of good, and my body physically, just to be out there,” Tate said.
Tate has acknowledged the project will eventually pass to someone else, since the home belongs to Friendsview rather than to her and Tom outright.
“I hope the next person to move in here would love it as much as I do,” Tate told Friendsview in an article posted October 2025. “But I know not everyone is as crazy as I am.”
