Houston's Japanese Garden is designed in the daimyo style, reminiscent of gardens designed by feudal Japanese warlords. Emphasizing meandering footpaths, the garden's plan encourages a leisurely stroll throughout a variety of landscape elements and water features. A traditional Japanese garden's rock formation would consist of naturally weathered stones, but Houston's lack of any such stones led Nakajima to personally select boulders of quarried pink granite from the Marble Falls area. He remarked of the substitution that, "The overwhelming force of the massive rocks seemed symbolic of Texas." Visitors enter the garden through a traditional gateway, with rooms on either side used to house a ticket booth, utility room, and restrooms inconspicuously. A stone lantern at the gateway serves to symbolically light one's way as they enter the garden. Typically, the only monuments or sculpture used in design of traditional Japanese gardens, three other stone lanterns are placed throughout the gardens, including two Yukimi-style snow viewing lanterns. Both positioned traditionally near the edge of water, one lantern, gifted to Houston by her sister city, Chiba, Japan, is across the pond from the teahouse another is near the garden's gazebo, which provides a place to rest near the edge of a stream. Crepe myrtles, azaleas, Japanese Maples, redbuds, dogwoods, peach trees, brazilwoods, and cherry trees have been cultivated, accompanied by a preexisting grove of old pine trees. In 1992, Nakajima also mentioned 30 varieties of grasses and varieties of shrubs on a list of plants he decorated the garden with. Japanese Garden is about 90 percent organic, both as a reflection of traditional Japanese horticulture, and to protect the pond's Koi population.
|
