Garden Clubs Want Park Named After Polly Judd

The Park Board hasn’t decided what to name Spokane’s newest park, but members of several garden clubs have a suggestion.

Part of the property that is the new neighborhood park in Historic Cannon’s Addition was once owned by a founder of the Spokane Lilac Festival - Polly Mitchell Judd.

Judd and her husband, Thomas Judd, lived for nearly 30 years in a large house at 1217 S. Oak, overlooking the park land. Garden club members think she should be commemorated in the new park name.

The Park Board will decide the issue later this year after it revises its policy for naming parks.

Currently there are about 10 park properties in the city without official names.

Until now, the park is known unofficially as Historic Cannon’s Addition Park.

Judd landscaped her two-acre yard with dozens of lilac bushes and had a lily fountain in the back yard.

But she was best known in Spokane for promoting the planting of lilacs.

Her collection is still growing at Manito Park’s lilac lane near the duck pond and at the Finch Arboretum.

She promoted Spokane as the “Lilac City of the Nation.”

Judd also was active in building the Japanese Garden at Manito Park from 1964 to 1973, and she was a founder of the Associated Garden Clubs of Spokane.

“She did an awful lot,” said her daughter, Bobbee Judd Eddy of Spokane.

Judd was the daughter of a pioneer orchardist in the Yakima Valley.

She attended Washington State University for two years, but her parents took her out of college during an influenza outbreak in 1918.

Judd and her husband moved to Spokane in 1930.

He spent his career as an engineer for Washington Water Power Co. He died in 1978, and Mrs. Judd died in 1981.

, DataTimes MEMO: See related story under the headline: New kid on the block