Japanese Garden

Japanese Garden. . This hill and water style garden was created in 1906. Within a period of just six months, landscape designer K. Wadamori and seven workmen from Japan transformed a hillside into a traditional Japanese landscape, using ponds, streams, hills, stones, bridges, and pathways. The team dug into the hillside to create the pools and formed rocky outcrops and ledges with glacial boulders and quarried stone. Over and through these features, they channeled brooks into cascading waterfalls. Though every aspect of the garden was man-made, it was designed to appear natural. In 1915, John Handrahan, Mary Clark Thompson’s landscape architect, more than doubled the size of the garden by adding a new pond and plantings to emphasize new vistas. , The garden’s centerpiece was the traditional Sukiya-style tea house with an Irimoya-style roof. K. Wadamori oversaw the building of the tea house, which was completed in 1908. , K. Wadamori used sculpture to create focal points, mark significant pathways, and provide visual interest. There are a variety of figures made of terra cotta, cast stone, and bronze, including: a Buddha, a five-tiered pagoda, and three pair of Komainu (lion-like guardians). , Key features of the tea house are traditional sliding screens and partitions. Bamboo furniture decorated the interior. , The Japanese Garden has four entrances. The main entrance is marked by a traditional Torii Gate, a gate found at the entrance to Shinto shrines to divide the human from the spiritual worlds. The garden’s three other entrances are smaller and are marked by bamboo or wood-shingled roofed structures.