OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK – Jack Galloway’s three-dimensional, hand-painted depiction of the park he has worked in for 17 years is hanging on the official White House Christmas Tree in Washington, D.C.
It’s the local representative on a tree that is decorated with ornaments from all the nation’s national parks – a motif chosen by first lady Laura Bush, a self-professed national park fan.
Galloway, a landscape architect for Olympic National Park, and his wife, Anna Manildi, executive director of the Juan de Fuca Festival of the Arts, attended a White House reception Wednesday hosted by the first lady, who hiked in Olympic National Park in July 2003.
The reception for some 600 to 700 people included designers of the 347 national park ornaments on the 18-foot Fraser fir in the Blue Room in the East Wing.
“We were made to feel very special,” Galloway said Friday, the day he and Manildi returned to Port Angeles.
“It was quite a thing to see unfold.”
The ONP ornament – glowing with blue, green and orange – hangs on the southeast bottom of the tree, just above the floor.
