leaves radiated down along arching “branches,” and as a whole it looked like a miniature tropical tree. However, unlike a tree, the plant had two thin stalks protruding from the top. These setae, part of the moss’s reproducing sporophyte, were red at the base, with the color shifting in gradients to green at the top, where two bright green, oval-shaped capsules sat, nodding downward, nearly ready to release their spores.
Next Darren handed me snake moss, which he said he liked showing to visiting kids. One after another, he pulled up tiny, individual plants of different mosses, and as they started to accumulate on my notebook, I could see how different they were one from the other when removed from their mats. One stood at least four inches tall with dark green, swordlike leaves. Another sprawled seaweed-like in a tangle of bright green, and still another looked like a feather taken from a parrot. They were all green, but the textures and variations of green were astonishing.
To describe the garden as a carpet would be a disservice because it looked much softer than any human-made carpet. The temptation to feel that soft, damp green on my feet was irresistible, and I joked to Darren that I would love to take my shoes and socks off and walk through it. He replied that he actually does that sometimes, when no one is around. I don’t think he was joking.
Once Darren and Bob left me to return to their duties, I retraced my steps back to the beginning of the Moss Garden, where two moss-covered rocks stood as guardians, to walk through the garden again, alone, in the quiet of the reserve. But what I didn’t realize was that I was starting my walk out of order, in the second room of the Garden Sequence. I had missed the first room.
Richard Haag, who designed the Garden Sequence at the Bloedel Reserve, had long been attached to the Pacific Northwest, spending most of his professional life in Seattle. He designed landscapes in the region but also around the world, as well as founding the landscape architecture program at the University of Washington, before he was chosen to shape these acres of formerly logged land.
The Garden Sequence begins in what was once the Garden of Planes, adjacent to the Moss Garden, but the start of the sequence no longer exists, as I would find out at the end of my walk when I visited the first room last. Originally the Moss Garden was a bog overgrown with pink-flowered salmonberries, and the tiny rivulets of water forking through the moss are evidence today of that bog. Haag said this garden was “created by selective subtractions of the nuances of nature from the chaos of a tangled bog,” reflecting a trademark of his design style. Here, as in another of his famous landscapes, Gas Works Park in Seattle, Haag liked to leave traces of the landscape’s history. By leaving the enormous downed logs, he recognized the history of logging in this place while contrasting it with the surrounding second-growth forest. By removing the undergrowth and leaving the trees and the ancient logs to be claimed by moss, Haag created a space that breaks free of any traditional landscape style.
The towering western hemlock trees, the bare roots tipped up vertically, the decay and decomposition, the damp earth, and the intimacy of the space make the garden feel primordial, as it’s often described today. It’s a walk back in time, where the ghosts of 700-year-old trees, gone for a hundred years, remain in the shapes under the moss.
Coming to the end of the Moss Garden, I stepped out of one room and into the most iconic place in the reserve, the Reflection Garden. In this room, set in grass, is a long, rectangular pool surrounded by a long, rectangular yew hedge. The room sits, almost impossibly, surrounded by towering trees, which are reflected in the smooth water. Linear, simple, obviously human made, it’s the opposite of the Moss Garden. And yet it complements the previous room with its green hues and lofty trees. Haag designed the Garden Sequence this way intentionally; the four rooms alternate between the obviously crafted to the more natural, although still heavily cultivated, spaces. They complement one another and lead the visitor through a pattern of interpreting nature in different ways.
Leaving the Reflection Garden, I wandered aimlessly along a wooded path, and while the ground wasn’t covered in moss, it still grew in thick patches along Douglas fir trunks and mixed in with licorice ferns. I crossed the road again and entered the lower portion of the Japanese Garden, not part of the Garden Sequence, where I found two ponds, one large and one small, split in half by a walkway. Along the undulating edges of the water, large boulders grew sweaters of moss and lichens, and a wooden bench sprouted moss from its corners. The smaller pond, punctuated with traditionally pruned pines and Japanese maples, reflected the image of the guesthouse perched on the hill above. The building is beautiful, with wide glass windows and a glass roof supported by large wood timbers—a merging of Japanese and Pacific Northwest design styles. Walking farther, I ended up at a Japanese rock garden—what used to be the Garden of Planes—situated behind the guesthouse at the top of the Japanese Garden.
Echoing the form of the Reflection Garden, a long, rectangular rock garden dominates the space. Nestled in the raked sand are two clusters of boulders, and surrounding the garden is a checkerboard of alternating squares of concrete stepping-stones and grass. The rectangular garden was originally a swimming pool before Haag’s redesign filled it with two pyramid shapes—one inverted and extending down into the former pool interior and the other rising up within that space right beside it. This was his Garden of Planes. Haag first envisioned the pyramids becoming slowly colonized by mosses. The surrounding checkerboard did not originally include grass, but moss squares alternating with the concrete stepping-stones.
Sadly, or perhaps ironically, the very year Haag won the prestigious President’s Award of Excellence from the American Society of Landscape Architects for his Garden Sequence design, the Garden of Planes was replaced with the rock garden and his Garden Sequence forever broken. According to Haag in an interview in Landscape Architecture Magazine, one reason, besides some internal politics, was because a fox had a den under a nearby stump and “every morning, the fox would come out and leave his morning offering right on top of the gravel pyramid.”
As I wandered around the rock garden, I noticed that the concrete stepping-stones were slowly being consumed by moss. The large boulders were similarly being enveloped by thick green clumps. After I had made my way through the reserve’s gardens, one fact seemed clear: moss simply grows, mindless of the grand designs of any human.
Having spent time in Japan, Richard Haag likely took inspiration for the Bloedel Reserve’s Anteroom from one of the world’s best-known moss gardens: Saiho-ji, in Kyoto. While Saiho-ji was first built hundreds of years ago, it wasn’t until after it fell into neglect and mosses claimed it that Buddhist monk Muso Soske embraced moss as part of the garden and experience. Today moss is a standard element in traditional Japanese garden design worldwide, including at the Seattle Japanese Garden.
I had been granted permission to visit the Seattle Japanese Garden during its annual winter closure, a time that allows the landscape crew to undertake major work. It wasn’t my first visit, but it was my first winter visit. The morning I arrived, a couple of weeks after I had visited the Bloedel Reserve, the weather was cold and crisp, with frost lining the grass and the edges of fallen leaves. My guide for this visit was Pete Putnicki, senior gardener at the Seattle Japanese Garden. Although Pete had only been the head gardener for a couple of years, he is intimately knowledgeable about the garden and has a tremendous eye for detail.
As we walked through the back gate and into the garden, he explained that while the mosses may look effortless to maintain, they’re really not. In autumn the crew must rake the leaves fallen from the garden’s many Japanese maples and other trees to prevent the leaves from damaging the mosses. Metal rakes can pull the moss out of the ground, so the crew uses traditional Japanese bamboo rakes to sweep up leaves and other debris, a slow, delicate process.
Pete pointed to a patch of moss with a rusty tinge and told me that this moss is one of their favorites in the garden: Sugi moss. Also known as Sugi-goke, meaning cryptomeria moss, it is popular in Japanese gardens. The name comes from the moss’s resemblance to the Japanese cedar tree, Cryptomeria japonica. When pulled out from the dense
