The judges of The Dalles’ 2026 garden contest, left to right: John Nelson, Jann Oldenburg, and Andruea Knight. (This image has been altered to remove children from the background)
The judges of The Dalles’ 2026 garden contest, left to right: John Nelson, Jann Oldenburg, and Andruea Knight. (This image has been altered to remove children from the background)
THE DALLES — Each month, from April to October, the city’s Beautification and Tree Committee picks a different garden to highlight. The von Borstels were officially recognized at an award ceremony held in their garden April 6, where they received a hat to keep and a carved wooden sign announcing the award, which will remain in their garden for the rest of the month before moving on to May’s winner.
Here’s the catch about this contest: You can’t enter it. So how exactly is a winner selected? Who makes that decision? And how might you be selected?
Each month’s winner is decided by a three-member subcommittee. This year’s judges are John Nelson, Jann Oldenburg, and Andruea Knight. The three roam The Dalles’ streets individually, looking at gardens throughout the city and taking pictures of potential candidates. They then confer, usually picking a winner by the third week of the month.
To win, gardens must be within city limits and visible from the street. Beyond that, the committee has no objective criteria. At the March 2, 2026 meeting of the Beautification Committee, Nelson described a typical winner as “influenced by love of planting and love of how things look, landscape-wise.”
The judges personal priorities are in play. In conversation with Uplift Local, Oldenburg stressed the choices owners make and the care they put into their garden. “Have they kept them up? Do they change out the dead plants? It’s really more of a design project,” she said.
Knight, who is new to garden judging this year, agreed that design is key: “It really tells the story of what kind of a gardener they are.” Nelson, the current chair of the Beautification Committee, added that “the stories that the property owners have are often unique and very specialized, and their knowledge and their interest, that adds to the garden.”
Past winners have often been active gardeners; some are even involved with programs such as Oregon State University’s Master Gardeners. Since 2020, there has only been one repeat winner: Lynn Long of 2401 Mt. Hood St., who won in 2021 and again last year. In that case, the committee felt her garden had changed so significantly that it was worth re-awarding, especially because it “was still as beautiful as it’s always been,” Nelson said.
The judges say people can get a lot of good ideas from the winning gardens.
“You can gain a lot of information by looking at other people’s gardens, whether it’s in design or type of plant,” Oldenburg said. “If you were thinking about it yourself, going ‘Well, I wonder how that would work in The Dalles, with the temperature that The Dalles is,’ and yet you can see it already growing in one of our gardens, you’d then go, ‘Oh, okay, this works.’”
The judges know it’s not always easy to garden, and that gardens can look a lot different in different neighborhoods, just based on microclimates.
But they shy away from offering advice on how to win. A garden “is a personal thing,” Oldenburg said, “You can’t tell someone [what to do.] They could take offense at that.”
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Swen Carlson is Uplift Local’s Community Editor in Oregon. He has lived in The Dalles for the past decade and got his start in journalism with Uplift Local’s Gorge Documenters program.
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