11/25/2023 0 Comments Zen gardens in america![]() SF residents and veterans are always free. You can get in free between 9 am and 10 am on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Afternoons tend to be the most crowded, but if you avoid the prime lunch period (11:30 to 2:00) you shouldn't have to wait for a table at the tea house. Golden Gate Park is on the foggy side of San Francisco, so visiting during Fog Season (May, June, July) may be a bit gray and damp but it does give it a rather mysterious look which is pretty cool, too. ![]() The tea house is an open air building, no walls, so it will be the same temperature as the outside. The winters here aren't that cold (mid 50's usually) so if you're wearing a jacket, it's OK. Otherwise, sunny days, year round, are the best time to go, because it should be warm enough to enjoy the stroll through the gardens. Absolute best time is when the cherry blossoms are blooming, in March and April. (The other claimant was a Chinese business, the Hong Kong Noodle Company, in Los Angeles.) In 1983, the SF Court of Historical Review actually had a hearing on this issue and the Tea Garden version won. The origin of fortune cookies was officially disputed. And they still serve them here: probably the only Japanese establishment in the U.S. to fortune cookies around 1900, serving them in the tea house, and they eventually spread to Chinese restaurants in San Francisco, then all over the world. The Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco was also, oddly enough, the first place in the world to serve fortune cookies as we know them, although something similar had been sold in Japan many years ago and was probably the inspiration. There was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the controversy surrounding the change. Most of the servers in the Tea House are now Japanese (or Japanese-American). Hagiwara.įor the past fifteen years, the Japanese Tea Garden concession had been under other management, but in the summer of 2009, the garden returned to Japanese hands. After the war, the garden got its original name back and the street was named after Mr. The garden went into a decline and many artifacts were stolen. He and his descendants were caretakers of the garden until 1942.ĭuring the war, anti-Japanese sentiment led to the Hagiwara family being interned and the garden was renamed the Oriental Tea Garden. It’s about an approach, about caring, and how you see things.Makoto Hagiwara, an immigrant from Japan, created an authentic Japanese tea garden in Golden Gate Park, contributing many valuable sculptures, structures and plants. One way is to do incremental cleaning and maintenance. “In Japan, only about 20 percent of the land is habitable, so people learn to care for their environment. Every time I walk in the garden I pick up a few pine needles, a bit of trash or a few leaves,” says Uchiyama. ![]() “It’s not so much about massive cleaning and pruning projects, but about constant small actions. Nothing is maintenance-free, and sometimes Japanese-style gardens involve even more maintenance than other gardens, they agree. Landscapers specializing in Japanese garden aesthetics say one persistent misconception is that these gardens are low-maintenance or even maintenance-free. “It’s very possible to create a wonderful Japanese garden using all native plants,” says Browne. The Japanese garden aesthetic “is very simple sounding, but it’s the most difficult thing I ever thought of in my life,” explains Powell.Īs for sustainability, there’s been a major shift in thinking about Japanese-style gardens away from specimen gardens, which tend to feel a bit like a botanical garden, and toward greater use of plants adapted to local environments. I think especially today, that idea of connecting the indoors and the outdoors is an aesthetic that a lot of people strive for,” he explains. “That is a big change from the U.S., where the landscaping was traditionally there to dress the exterior of the house, but was very disconnected from interior space. John Powell, a garden builder and pruning specialist from Weatherford, Texas, who trained in Japan, says he was attracted to Japanese gardens by “the seamless connection between interior and exterior space, which is evocative of the larger natural world, sometimes in a very compressed space.” Other aesthetic concepts he says are widely appreciated now are asymmetrical balance, and the beauty and importance of rocks, stones and boulders as the “bones” of a composition, which can then be filled in in a supportive way with plantings. “In Japan at least, it seems that there is one core idea that has come down over centuries, and that is the idea of bringing the beauty of nature into daily lives,” he says.
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