Despite their brevity, drafting mission and vision statements is a challenging task. Boiling down decades of history and plans for the future – along with the DNA of an organization – into succinct statements requires deep, collaborative thought. I am proud to announce that a Mission & Vision task force, comprised of staff and trustees of Bloedel Reserve recently revised our foundational statements, and am sharing our new, board approved statements in this blog post.
The revision process was kicked off during our Interpretive Master Planning project, when the Bloedel Reserve Board of Trustees realized that our mission and vision statements had not been revised in many years. They decided that the organization was due for a fresh look at these guiding words. A Task Force was formed, and we began reviewing historical documents and statements from peer organizations, and discussing the legacy, future and deep philosophy of the organization.
We all agreed on a few core principles. We wanted succinct, poetic statements that captured the unique scope of the organization. We wanted the statements to reflect the deep philosophy of the garden, established by Prentice and Virginia Bloedel. We wanted the statements to be inspiring and to capture the excitement of a growing garden. With those principles in mind, we realized that two statements would not be enough to cover everything, so we decided to expand into four short foundational statements, as you’ll see below.
The task force deeply considered every word in these statements, discussing how we, as people deeply involved with the organization, perceived them and contrasting that with how a casual reader might experience these words. We talked about the fundamental principles that were laid out in the founding vision of Bloedel Reserve, and how those have evolved as we’ve grown from a private garden to a community asset and horticultural destination.
A substantial portion of our discussion was centered on the word beauty, which appears at the beginning of the mission statement. As task force member Todd Vogel wrote, “I believe that beauty is precisely where Bloedel can put a stake in the ground… To succeed, then, Bloedel needs to know what it is doing when it invokes the term ‘Beauty’ – and it needs to stick to its core principles of cultivating a wild, natural environment.”
The task force recognized that Beauty can be a loaded word. For some, it might conjure a specific ideal or be seen through a limited cultural lens at the exclusion of other interpretations. We felt that Bloedel Reserve, with its unique aesthetic centered on the interaction between a natural ecosystem and a designed garden, should share its own interpretation of beauty widely and proudly. That interpretation is subtle, in conversation with the natural environment, showcasing the natural ecology of our site, the cycle of life in the Northwest Forests, and a careful, thoughtful approach to design and interventions on the landscape.
We felt that those sentiments echoed the founding vision of the Reserve. In the words of Prentice Bloedel:
“Those familiar with countryside and woodlands are aware of nature’s capacity to soothe, compose scenes of rare beauty, inspire feelings of awe, fear or even kinship. This experience is the essence of the Reserve’s message to mankind and governs its physical development”
With those conversations, and many more in mind, the Bloedel Reserve Board of Trustees adopted the following statements in March 2025, which I am pleased to share with you now:
Mission Statement
We celebrate beauty by cultivating our environment, building community, and deepening relationships to the natural world.
Vision Statement
Reciprocity with the land contributes to a healthy, sustainable, and inspired future.
Our Name & Founding Vision
Bloedel Reserve is named for Prentice and Virginia Bloedel whose unique vision still guides the Reserve today.
Gardens in the Forest
Bloedel Reserve combines landscape design with the ecology of the Pacific Northwest forest on 140 acres of gardens and tended wildlands on Bainbridge Island in Washington.
I hope that these words resonate for you, as they did for the task force. Thank you to staff members Amy King, Etta Lilienthal, and Joe Piecuch, trustee’s Van Siddaiah, Katie Strong, Nate Thomas, and Todd Vogel, and facilitator Dayna Hanson for crafting these statements. Visit our updated Mission & Vision webpage.
Evan Meyer
President & CEO
