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Nancy
Marrill Hanners, from left, Julie Gillies and
Diane Clouser chat outside of The Guest House at
the Bloedel Reserve that overlooks the Japanese
Garden on Washington's Bainbridge Island.
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SEATTLE
— The pitter-patter of my sneakers on the gravel
entryway was the most pronounced sound at the Bloedel
Reserve. That’s when I realized I had stepped into a
sanctuary at this Bainbridge Island garden.
Loud?
Loud is sitting at the bench behind the former Bloedel
mansion on the bluff, watching seagulls hover over the
banks at low tide, the wind rustling an elm tree, a small
waterfall gently burbling a few steps away.
Until
two years ago, Bloedel Reserve allowed no more than 20
visitors at any one time into the 150-acre garden on the
island’s northern tip.
There’s
no cap on visitors anymore. But there still is a sense of
monastery-like quiet and calmness, a sense that the garden
is all yours to wander. For visitors, this naturalistic
garden has been a place of solace after personal tragedies
and public tragedies such as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks.
Gardens,
by their nature and design, can serve as sanctuaries even
when they sit on the edge of city streets such as Seattle’s
Kubota Garden and Bellevue Botanical Garden. Like the
Bloedel Reserve, those gardens also can give visitors a
sense of solace. The Bellevue Botanical Garden offers 53
acres of ponds, meadows and gardens with an Alpine rock
landscape and a Japanese gate.
In
Seattle’s Rainier Beach neighborhood, Kubota Garden
features a furrowed landscape of streams, waterfalls and
stones, appearing bigger than its 20 acres. It’s a
Northwest garden with a Japanese sensibility, created by
horticultural pioneer Fujitaro Kubota.
But
for solitude, even though Seattle is only a 35-minute
ferry ride away, head to Bainbridge’s Bloedel Reserve.
Reservations
aren’t required anymore at Bloedel. Just show up and pay
the entrance fee. Once through the gatehouse, walk through
meadows to the wooded area where a bark-covered trail
muffles your steps. It’s a bird refuge, with redwinged
blackbirds hovering above. More than half the 150 acres
are a forest of Douglas fir, Western red cedar and
hemlock.
The
woodland opens to a pond where ducks and geese dabble.
Beyond is the visitor center, once the home of Prentice
Bloedel. A timber baron, Bloedel purchased this land for
himself and his wife, Virginia, in 1951 and bought more
acres over the next three decades. The center resembles a
French chateau, with some 18th-century furniture and a
1,400-book library of garden and plant references that
visitors can browse through.
Behind
the former mansion is a bench where you can enjoy the view
from the bluff, with Port Madison Bay in the distance. A
waterfall trickles. If you’re lucky, a gentle breeze
brushes your face under the sun.
Even
in the autumn of his life, Bloedel, who had suffered
polio, faithfully made his rounds through the garden.
"People think because of polio he created this place,
where people could feel better and be healed through
nature," said Bloedel Reserve executive director Ed
Moydell.
The
estate, donated by the Bloedels decades ago, is run by a
nonprofit group. Maintenance has been a financial burden.
Officials have had to lay off workers and delay some
projects in recent years. In the last 18 months, $2.5
million has been raised for its endowment. The garden,
senior officials said, is on firmer financial footings
these days.
Only
half the 150 acres are accessible to the public. But
Bloedel workers are working on expanding a trail that
would give visitors access to 30 more acres in a
wilderness area along the bluff.
Still,
the garden is big enough and the events few enough that
visitors still find the seclusion that the Bloedel family
created, especially if you visit midweek and when there
aren’t special events.
The
1.75-mile trail that takes visitors around the garden is
an easy walk, dotted with 20 benches along the way and no
steep uphill climbs. The trail doesn’t diverge much, so
visitors need not worry about getting lost and can instead
focus on enjoying the woodland and the thousands of bulbs
and perennials.
The
path was never meant to be a strenuous hike, said Bloedel
spokeswoman Kate Gormley. The garden is the thing. There
is a Zen mantra to it all. No signs to identify the 6-foot
tall Giant Himalayan Lily or other plants. Prentice
Bloedel, who died in 1996, wanted visitors to enjoy the
garden and not be obsessed with names and labels, staffers
said. He also hosted many artists and poets who made this
their retreat.
Visitors
can stroll by a Japanese garden, a stone landscape and a
guesthouse, made from red cedar and Douglas fir, that
fuses Northwest Native American longhouse design with
Japanese teahouse aesthetics. Nearby, walls of manicured
yews enclose a reflection garden with a rectangular pool,
a favorite spot of Prentice and Virginia Bloedel. Their
ashes are buried below the hedge that edges the pool.
There are online testimonials by visitors about what
Bloedel’s tranquility and seclusion have meant to them.
A couple who lost their 10-month-old son in a car accident
wrote that the garden helped them heal through their
darkest hour. A Persian Gulf War veteran said it gave her
"a peace of mind."
Bloedel
spokeswoman Gormley still gets choked up walking by the
reflection pool. She recalls a group touring a week after
the Sept 11 attacks. After chatting and laughing, the
group entered the reflection garden. Tears rolled. "I
think they had experienced anxiety, fear, anger and
sadness that they were not able to process into words
before," she said.
———
IF
YOU GO:
GETTING
THERE: Take Washington State Ferries from downtown Seattle
to Bainbridge Island. Drive on State Route 305 for six
miles, turn right on Agatewood Road N.E., and right again
on N.E. Dolphin Drive that leads to the Bloedel gatehouse.
WASHINGTON
STATE FERRIES: