Hulda klager biography sampler

WOODLAND, Cowlitz County — Hulda Klager was 83 years old in the spring of 1948, when the Columbia and Lewis rivers swelled with heavy rains, rushed past her protests and flooded her prized lilac garden.

She had named and nurtured the shrubs and plants for 45 years.

They all died.

But Klager was a tough woman, who had already overcome her size (she was not quite five feet tall but bore four children), circumstances (she tumbled out West in a covered wagon and married a dairy farmer when she was 16) and expectations (at one time, she had hybridized 64 of the 250 varieties recognized by the International Lilac Society in Ontario, Canada).

Friends, family and strangers brought back rare species she had thought were lost forever.

She replanted and relandscaped. Two years later, the garden was replenished. And when she died in 1960, at the age of 96, it was only after she had just finished another day working