Why stop here
In 1951, timber executive Prentice Bloedel, whose family firm became part of MacMillan Bloedel Ltd., one of Canada's largest forest-products companies, bought 67 acres of second-growth forest on Bainbridge Island (the property later grew to roughly 140 acres) and spent 37 years transforming logged timberland into a masterpiece garden. Working with renowned landscape architects Thomas Church, Fujitaro Kubota, and Richard Haag, he created a nationally ranked Japanese Garden, a moss garden with more than 50 species of mosses and lichens, and a reflection pool framed by yew hedges in a forest clearing. Opened to the public in 1988, the Reserve represents redemption: a timber magnate healing the scars his industry left behind.
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The long version
When Prentice Bloedel bought 67 acres of logged forest on the north end of Bainbridge Island in 1951, he was one of the Pacific Northwest’s most prominent timber executives. His father, Julius Bloedel, a Wisconsin-born lumberman, had built Bloedel, Stewart & Welch, a major timber company with vast holdings in British Columbia and Washington.
For decades, Prentice had helped run the family business. He oversaw the cutting of old-growth forests, the operation of massive sawmills, the shipping of lumber worldwide. The Bloedel name meant timber, wealth, and power.
But Prentice was different from other timber executives. He had wanted to be a teacher. His father convinced him to join the company in 1929, and Prentice spent the next 22 years proving he could build an empire.
In 1951, the family company merged with H.R. MacMillan Export Co., creating MacMillan Bloedel Ltd., which would grow into what company histories describe as Canada’s largest forest-products company. That same year, Prentice moved to Bainbridge Island with his wife Virginia Merrill Bloedel, bought 67 acres of cutover land (the property would later expand to roughly 140 acres), and began the work that would define the rest of his life. He remained on MacMillan Bloedel’s board until retiring from it in 1972, but his heart was increasingly in the garden.
The land Prentice bought had been logged. The massive old-growth Douglas firs and western red cedars were gone, cut by companies like the one his family owned. What remained was second-growth forest: young trees, scrub brush, and the stumps of giants.
Other timber barons built mansions, collected art, endowed universities. Prentice Bloedel decided to heal the land.
For the next 37 years (1951-1988), he and Virginia worked with landscape architects, gardeners, and ecologists to transform logged timberland into a garden that honored nature rather than dominated it.
Prentice didn’t hire a landscape architect and walk away. He was involved in every decision, every planting, every stone placement.
His philosophy was unusual: embrace process over rigid master plans. He believed landscapes should evolve, that “mistakes” could become beautiful, that layers of history should remain visible.
He said: “Man is not set apart from the rest of nature… we are trustees in this world.”
This was a radical statement for a timber baron.
Prentice and Virginia worked with the greatest landscape architects of the era:
Thomas Church (1954-1976): Designed the driveway approach, main pond, and reflection pool. Church was California’s preeminent modernist landscape architect.
Fujitaro Kubota (1955-1961): Created the Japanese Garden, a pond-style stroll garden on the shore that would later be ranked among the top ten Japanese gardens in America.
Richard Haag (1969-1984): Designed the Moss Garden, Reflection Garden, and Garden of Planes. Haag won the American Society of Landscape Architects’ President’s Award for Design Excellence in 1986 for his garden sequence at Bloedel.
Koichi Kawana, Iain Robertson, and Paul Hayden Kirk also contributed designs.
In 1955, Prentice and Virginia commissioned Fujitaro Kubota to design a Japanese garden.
Kubota was a Seattle-based landscape architect and nursery owner who had designed gardens across the Pacific Northwest. (His own Kubota Garden in Seattle is now a public park and a designated City of Seattle landmark.)
At Bloedel Reserve, Kubota created a pond-style stroll garden that blended traditional Japanese design with Pacific Northwest ecology. The garden featured:
The Journal of Japanese Gardening has ranked Bloedel’s Japanese Garden among the top Japanese gardens in the United States in its periodic national survey.
Working with Richard Haag, the Bloedels created the Moss Garden in 1982, planting some 275,000 plugs of Irish moss that native mosses soon colonized.
Today, according to the Reserve, more than 50 species of mosses and lichens carpet two acres of forest floor. The garden feels ancient, primordial, as if humans stumbled upon a place that existed long before they arrived.
Walking through the Moss Garden, you see dozens of shades of green: emerald, jade, olive, chartreuse. The ground is soft underfoot. Everything is silent except for birdsong and the rustle of wind in the canopy.
The Moss Garden embodies Prentice’s philosophy: slow beauty, patient cultivation, respect for natural processes.
One of the most striking spaces at Bloedel Reserve is the Reflection Pool, a rectangular pool framed by clipped yew hedges roughly ten feet tall in a forest clearing.
The design is stark, geometric, almost severe. The pool is perfectly still. The hedges are clipped into sharp lines. The sky reflects on the water.
It’s the opposite of the Moss Garden’s organic chaos. Here, human order meets wilderness. The contrast is intentional.
Prentice wanted visitors to experience both: the wild and the controlled, the natural and the cultivated, the forest and the garden.
Prentice didn’t just plant gardens. He enhanced natural wetlands to support wildlife.
The Bird Marsh features steep drop-offs and nesting islands designed to attract waterfowl and shorebirds. It’s not a garden for humans to walk through, it’s a habitat for birds, frogs, and insects.
This reflected Prentice’s conservation ethic: humans are part of nature, not separate from it.
Prentice’s work at the Reserve mirrored his work in the timber industry.
In 1938, decades before “sustainable forestry” became mainstream, Prentice launched a reforestation program; HistoryLink describes his firm as the first company in the region to plant seedlings after logging.
By the 1940s, according to HistoryLink, his company carried out 70 percent of all reforestation by private industry in British Columbia.
He pioneered waste reduction:
He believed timber companies had a responsibility to replant, restore, and sustain forests for future generations.
This was controversial. Most timber companies practiced “cut and run” logging, clear-cutting forests and moving on. Prentice argued that forests were renewable resources if managed correctly.
His work at Bloedel Reserve was an extension of this philosophy: cut the forest, then heal it.
By the 1970s, maintaining the Reserve had become too expensive for the Bloedels. In 1970, they donated the property to the University of Washington, but the university struggled to afford upkeep.
In 1974, the Bloedels established The Arbor Fund, a nonprofit endowment, to preserve the Reserve.
In 1985, the Arbor Fund purchased the Reserve from the university.
In 1988, the Bloedel Reserve opened to the public as a 140-acre garden and forest preserve.
Prentice was in his late eighties. He had spent 37 years building the garden. Now anyone could visit.
Prentice Bloedel was born in Bellingham, Washington, in 1900. His father, Julius Bloedel, a Wisconsin native, built a timber empire in Washington and British Columbia.
Prentice graduated from Yale University and became a teacher. He loved education and had no interest in the family business.
But in 1929, his father convinced him to join the company. Prentice proved to be a brilliant businessman. He modernized operations, expanded markets, and guided the family firm into the 1951 merger that created MacMillan Bloedel Ltd., which grew into Canada’s largest forest-products company.
But he never stopped thinking of himself as a teacher.
In retirement, he taught through the landscape. The Reserve was his classroom. Every garden, every path, every carefully placed stone was a lesson: humans can heal what they damage.
Prentice and Virginia were also major art collectors. They donated Henri Matisse’s Odalisque to the Seattle Art Museum (though it was later discovered to have been looted by the Nazis and was returned to the heirs).
Their daughter, Virginia Wright, continued the family’s philanthropic tradition, supporting Seattle’s art institutions for decades.
Prentice died in June 1996 at age 95 in his Seattle home, 45 years after buying the land, 8 years after opening it to the public.
Today, the Bloedel Reserve is:
Land acknowledgment: The Reserve sits on the ancestral territory of the Suquamish Tribe (dxʷsəq’ʷəb, “place of clear salt water”).
The Bloedel Reserve is a paradox: a garden built by the wealth of logging, designed to heal the scars of logging.
It represents:
Prentice Bloedel spent the first half of his life cutting trees. He spent the second half planting them.
The Reserve is his apology, and his legacy.
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