For islander Jean Atwater, home is where quiet, unpretentious people are.

Jean Atwater’s brush strokes are a reminder of the many places she’s roamed.

Her apartment walls are adorned with the grasslands of middle America, overpasses near Spokane and a sun-drenched steeple in Greece. Other paintings, hidden from view, capture scenes from her home state of Montana and her many years in Concord, Massachusetts.

Since moving to Bainbridge three years ago, Atwater hasn’t painted much. Instead, the island itself has become her canvas.

“I’ve always loved gardening, always loved plants,” she said. “When I was a lot younger and had children, I found the garden was a place I could think. It gave me inner-peace. Now, I suppose, it’s like painting. I want the garden to look well and grow well. It’s still a creative outlet.”

Atwater is a core member of the “Friday Tidies” who meet each week to spruce up the gardens surrounding the Bainbridge Library. She’s also adopted part of a parking lot near her apartment where she’s converting beauty bark and weeds into a little forest of sedges and dogwood.

The apartment complex’s landscapers now refrain from lopping the lot’s trees, allowing Atwater to attend to them with a more gentle touch.

“I’ve never gardened in this climate,” she said. “The plants are unfamiliar. Still, after three years, I’m learning.”

While new to the Bainbridge, Atwater has lived here long enough to notice more than the character of the island’s changing seasons. She’s witnessed the rapid growth of human development that could, she said, pave over the greenery and calm that drew her to the island.

“This was a quiet road when I moved here,” she said, pointing north across Knechtel Way. “Now there’s very big, very expensive condo units that are selling for over $400,000.”

Atwater and her husband moved to the island to be near their daughter and her family. After her husband’s death, Atwater quickly found herself in a supportive community that welcomed her into church, literary and gardening groups.

“I like the quiet, unpretentiousness of the people here,” she said. “They are very involved in their government and politics and with their history. Even newcomers want so much to connect with something, and they can here.”

Atwater has found many like-minded people who share a vast curiosity.

“Many friends have grown out of gardening,” she said. “We have great comradere and we work hard at the library, planting and tending things, shoveling manure.”

Painting is an activity Atwater speaks fondly of, but would prefer to keep in the past, when the activity dominated much of her time. Atwater’s work showed in many galleries but the stress of shipping paintings, promoting her art and other “art business” pressures led her to hang up the palette board.

“I lost my studio when we came here,” she said. “I can’t really paint here in this apartment. It’s a part of what I did but don’t do anymore.”

Reading a range of books has, in part, taken the place of her artistic pursuits.

“As an old person – and I certainly am – I now have the time to read,” she said. “I’ve been given a gift.”

Atwater’s eyes brighten when she takes hold of a library book from stacks on her coffee table.

Her church’s reading group has filled her literary plate with a feast of books on comparative religion. Still, she has room for books on ornamental grasses, Middle Eastern history and Pulitzer Prize-winning novels.

She also reads travel books, often about places she’s been, as a way to reflect on what she learned or how she grew from each destination.

Some of those places could be particularly instructive for island residents who, like her, aim to preserve some of the characteristics that brought them here.

Like Bainbridge, Concord was a small town filled with well-educated, inquisitive and creative people, she said.

“I enjoyed living in Concord,” she said. “I liked the coziness of it before it was gussied up with boutiques.

“As old families died off, the wonderful real shops – the slightly shabby places with the things you really need – were replaced by fancy shops.”

When Winslow Hardware on Winslow Way closed last year, Atwater’s urban growth alarm went off.

“I hated to see the hardware store go,” she said. “It was so important. It held the town together and people mourned when it closed.

“Do you think people will feel the same when a smart furniture store closes?”

Atwater, an avid reader of the island’s lore, believes the early diversity that gave the island its identity could also fade.

Once a place that boasted a range of races, ages and incomes, Atwater fears a growing social homogenization.

“Older people are finding the (housing) prices quite perilous,” she said. “Essentially, they’re being kept out of housing that is reasonable or affordable at their level. And then people’s kids want to settle here but can’t because it’s so expensive.

“I don’t know if my grandchildren could ever live here, but I want them to, absolutely. If things become too lopsided, with only high prices, it will drive away a whole segment of people and keep new life from coming in.”

Traffic has also been on the rise since Atwater’s lived on the island, she said. Madison Avenue has become a fast-moving and noisy throughway which she now avoids in favor of pathways that run from her apartment to Winslow Way.

“I wouldn’t want to see Bainbridge become another big metropolitan area because that would be so unpleasant,” she said. “People came here because they’re disenchanted with the Seattle noise.”

Atwater is not unaware that some long-time residents may consider her quite new to the island, and that she is part of the growth she identifies as one of her key concerns.

“I feel that I’m part of the problem,” she said. “I’m part of it, but I try to be unobtrusive about it. When I was new to the community I kept quiet. I didn’t feel right to criticize. I thought, ‘who am I to say?’

“But I say it anyway because it’s a fact.”

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Islandwise

These profiles are part of an ongoing series on Bainbridge families, coinciding with a new project called Islandwise that’s looking for shared community values.