The Story of Giberson Farm

🌿 🐎 🌸 🪵 🌱

1977

The Beginning — A Family Puts Down Roots

Some stories begin with a bold decision. Ours began with a horse pasture, a dream, and a family of four piling into a new life on a small island most people had never heard of.

In 1977, Dennis and Sharon Giberson left Seattle behind and moved their young family — five-year-old Loreen and two-year-old Lloyd — to the quiet, windswept shores of Whidbey Island, Washington. Dennis had a love of plants that ran deep, and so they bought a nursery in Clinton. Then they did something even bolder: they bought a five-acre horse pasture on Hellman Road — a former strawberry farm — and decided to build their home there from the ground up.

Picture it: a flat, open field. A young family. A set of plans and a whole lot of faith. What they built over the coming decades was nothing short of remarkable.

Over the years, that five-acre pasture became something that could only be called an oasis. Meandering gardens. Towering rhododendrons in impossible bloom. Old-growth woods with hand-cut trails winding through the trees. A treehouse. Horses and chickens. A sprawling vegetable garden. Dennis and Sharon didn't just build a farm — they built a world.

"They took a horse pasture and turned it into something that took your breath away every single season."

The Years Between

A Life in Full Bloom

Children grew up on that land. They climbed the treehouse, chased the chickens, and learned the rhythms of the seasons — the frost-bitten mornings, the apple-scented falls, the way the rhododendrons lit up pink and purple every spring without fail.

Loreen and Lloyd eventually grew up and moved on, as children do. But the farm kept living. Dennis kept tending. Sharon kept nurturing. The gardens kept growing. The years passed, and Giberson Farm remained what it had always been: a place of extraordinary, quiet beauty.

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2024

A Homecoming — and a New Chapter Begins

In the summer of 2024, Loreen brought her boyfriend Sean down from Alaska to meet her parents. Sean — a man who had spent his life in the rugged wilderness of the far north — stepped onto the land on Hellman Road and felt something shift.

"I could see myself living in a place like this someday," he said.

It wasn't just the beauty of the land — though that was undeniable. It was also the tender reality that Dennis and Sharon, now in their eighties, were slowing down. The farm that had given so much to so many was in need of fresh hands and renewed energy. Loreen and Sean drove back to Alaska and couldn't stop talking about it.

2025

The Move — Down the Alcan and Into a New Life

By early 2025, Loreen and Sean — now husband and wife — had made their decision. They sold and gave away everything they owned in Anchorage. They loaded what mattered into the truck and the camper and pointed south, rolling down the long, legendary Alaska-Canada Highway toward Whidbey Island.

They arrived in September to golden light and cool salt air. The apples were still hanging on the trees. The old woods smelled of cedar and earth. The farm welcomed them home.

That fall, Dennis and Sharon made the bittersweet but loving decision to move into a smaller condo in a nearby retirement community — a chapter closing gently, as the best ones do. In late December, Loreen and Sean took over stewardship of Giberson Farm, and the work of renewal began.

"We are not certain what the future holds — but we are blessed to spend this time breathing life into the Giberson Farm."

Today

Spring on Hellman Road — The Farm Wakes Up

Seven months in, and the farm is coming alive again.

Sean is in the greenhouse — tinkering, upgrading, starting seedlings that will become this season's abundance. Loreen is out in the garden beds, pruning the sprawling rhododendrons and hauling chips to mulch the paths her father first laid out nearly fifty years ago. Spring has arrived on Whidbey Island, and everything — the bulbs, the buds, the old apple trees — is waking up right on schedule.

🐾 And then there is Maynard.

Their farm dog Maynard has found his calling. He races the four-wheeler through the field. He chases the birds from the garden beds with the focused intensity of a professional. He performs daily inspections of the perimeter, ensuring no deer has dared approach the plants on his watch. He has never, in all his life, been this happy.

Neither, it seems, have his people.

Giberson Farm is not just a piece of land. It is nearly fifty years of love made visible — in every rhododendron, every trail through the old-growth, every seedling in the greenhouse. We are honored to carry it forward.

— Loreen & Sean

🌱 Giberson Farm · Hellman Road, Whidbey Island, WA