Rich Haag with a clump of Equisetum, one of his favorite plants. Photo: Daniel Jost.
On a recent tour of the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, Washington, Richard Haag, FASLA, told a group of us, students from the University of Washington, two stories about the demise of the Garden of Planes. The garden was the first stop in the famous sequence of spaces that Haag designed at the reserve, and it was erased a few years after it was completed.
One story involves a fox. “A fox used to have a den there,” Haag explained as we passed by a giant stump that, ironically, Haag preserved for its habitat value. “And every morning, the fox would come out and leave his morning offering right on top of the gravel pyramid,” at the center of the Garden of Planes, he said. “That’s one of the reasons they got rid of it.”
The other involves a trip Haag took to Europe in the early 1960s, with some of Seattle’s political and business leaders. On the trip, Haag apparently made enemies with some of Seattle’s old guard by promoting the socialist landscapes of Stockholm. Some of those same people were later part of the foundation that took over management of Bloedel in the late 1980s and removed Haag’s work. “That’s how I was paid back,” Haag says. “That’s a lesson for you. Don’t make those sorts of enemies.” He pauses. “Unless you want to do it your way.”
Of course, Haag frequently has done it his way. And quite often, he’s managed to bring people over to his way of thinking—whether it is persuading parents of the value of more adventurous natural play or enlightening local leaders of the value of the Pike Place Market, or seeing a gas works or a stump as beautiful and worthy of preservation.
With the release of the Cultural Landscape Foundation’s newest oral history module, you can walk with Haag through some of his most famous landscapes, just as generations of his university students have. And you can hear how he convinced clients to try out new ideas.
“Rich proved that we could have an activist practice in landscape architecture,” Gary Hilderbrand, FASLA, writes in one of many short reflections from Haag’s colleagues that TCLF collected. “Rich can turn a cause into a project, and he can enlarge a commission into a transcendent cause when that is needed. When he believes in something, he pushes for it.”
Daniel Jost, ASLA, is a LAM contributing editor and an MLA candidate at the University of Washington.
The Moss Garden (fox habitat) at the Bloedel Reserve. Photo: Daniel Jost
Leave a Reply