Elda Behm's Paradise Garden grew from Elda Behm's lifelong love of gardening and became the beginning of the Highline SeaTac Botanical Garden through a broad community effort. From childhood she loved plants, later pursued landscape design, and belonged to prominent Puget Sound garden clubs. She began her Paradise Garden in her backyard in 1954, shaping it around flowing water and water features and filling it with a remarkable variety of plants. Many of the plants later preserved there had started as seedlings and cuttings more than forty years earlier in her original garden near 159th and Des Moines Memorial Drive. In the late 1990's, when plans for a third runway at SeaTac Airport threatened the garden's future, Elda inspired two-hundred volunteers to move nearly every plant from her home to North SeaTac Park over more than six months. Eighty-five percent of the plants survived the relocation, reflecting her care and lifetime of gardening knowledge. The garden became the first of many display beds in the Highline SeaTac Botanical Garden and preserved rhododendrons of many species, black trilliums, many kinds of trees, and a shade garden with dozens of ferns and hostas. Elda wished to share both the beauty of these plants and her belief that a love of gardening and a love of people can accomplish something great and lasting.