Green Flag Award Employee of the Year – Gail Hering 

Written By: Todd Burley

For 26 years, Seattle Parks and Recreation (SPR) Senior Gardener Gail Hering has been the keystone of maintaining Seward Park’s landscapes. Her dedication and craft were recently recognized on an international level by the Green Flag Award as the Employee of the Year in their Best of the Best Awards. Seward Park is the first municipal park to receive the Green Flag Award in the United States, thanks in large part to Gail’s stewardship.  

Read GFA’s announcement > 

Gail has worked independently and under limited supervision to prioritize the upkeep of this highly used regional park. With the amount of specialty gardens, plus supervising laborers and prioritizing daily activities to maintain such a park, it takes a lot of dedication and responsibility.  She preps, plants, mulches, fertilizes, weeds, prunes shrubs and trees, transplants, mows, and irrigates over a dozen plant beds and landscapes. Gail also supports Seward Park’s natural areas by artfully pruning trees and shrubs and removing invasive plants along trails. She keeps the 2.4-mile outer loop walking path blown and clear of vegetation to keep the community and park users safe. While she may be best known for her beautiful entrance beds, which are often photographed, Gail is most proud of her work with the native plant demonstration garden by the Seward Park Audubon Center. 

Seward Park is a peninsula that juts out into Lake Washington, and as such, all visitors enter in the same place and typically walk by the Audubon Center, a historic building that hosts Audubon Washington. As part of the development of this building and partnership, she participated in the design and planting of a Native Plant Demonstration Garden that welcomes all visitors to the park. This landscape shows in real life how native species can be thoughtfully used to create beautiful gardens that also provide habitat and climate benefits for wildlife.  

Gail recently shared that one of the joys she feels is seeing various plants bloom as the seasons progress. From the first bloom of the Red Flowering Currant to the Western Trillium that peppers the garden floor, there is always something changing in this garden. A Pileated Woodpecker has even returned regularly to a Tall Oregon Grape to feast on the berries each year, a testament to how the native plant garden merges seamlessly with the adjacent old growth forest. 

Owing in large part to her longevity at a single park site, Gail has consistently shown up to demonstrate innovative skills in how to align horticultural practices with nature-based solutions. At Seward Park, she is a steady hand that shows how such practices can be integrated into other parks throughout our 6,600-acre system. Every day, visitors experience her skillful implementation of best management practices in a way that not just aligns with the overall purpose and feel of this nature park but also helps them learn how to create such landscapes in their own yards. She is consistently recognized by visitors to the park for her dedication and skills, and continues to be a great partner to community groups with an interest in Seward Park. 

Congratulations to Gail for receiving this international recognition!