Japanese Design at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is a 52-acre green space of spectacular plants from all over the globe, situated in the heart of Brooklyn, New York City. It is located right next to the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Both the Garden and the Museum were built in the nineteenth century. The Botanic Garden packs a dense profusion of lovely cultivated trees, shrubs, flowering plants and cleverly designed historic and specialty gardens into a relatively small area.

The Garden Masterpiece of Takeo Shiota

Just inside the entrance to the Botanic Garden is the Hill-and-Pond Garden, a traditional Japanese garden, complete with carp-filled pond and ancient Shinto shrine. It is the oldest Japanese garden in a public garden in the United States and was designed by Japanese landscape designer, Takeo Shiota, who was born in 1881 and died in 1943. According to Garden sources, the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden is considered to be Shiota’s masterpiece.

Careful Landscaping Despite Natural Appearance

The Hill-and-Pond Garden combines both the hill-and-pond style and the stroll-garden style of Japanese landscape design. There is a hill, a pond and a waterfall, as well as winding stone paths that reveal the garden’s many charms.

Several plants traditionally found in a Japanese garden are present, including irises, peonies, maples, azaleas and, of course, cherries, which grace the pond with their delightful colors and fragrance during the annual Sakura Matsuri, or cherry blossom festival. Despite the natural and informal appearance, trees and shrubs in the Japanese garden are carefully pruned to look old and windswept, or to represent hills and clouds.

World-Class Bonsai Collection

In keeping with the interest in Japanese horticultural tradition, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden also has a fascinating collection of bonsai trees. These are miniature trees in pots that are artfully cultivated by carefully pruning the stems and roots and controlling how much food the plant gets. Both the Japanese art of Bonsai and its more ancient predecessor, the Chinese art of Penjing, are characterized by a reverence for nature and Asian symbolism that is expressed with the placement of branches, the styling and the kind of pot used.

Housed in a Japanese-style room at the Steinhardt Conservatory, complete with a toconoma, or alcove, the C. V. Starr Bonsai Museum at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden is, according to Garden sources, the second largest bonsai collection accessible to the public outside of Japan and the oldest and largest in the United States.

The collection started in 1925 with only about 30 trees. The C. V. Starr Museum now displays up to 100 trees at a time, representing several bonsai styles, including “root over rock” and forest style groupings. These extraordinarily graceful little trees delight visitors by exhibiting the changing seasons on a Lilliputian scale. Included in the Garden’s bonsai collection are maples, pines, junipers and flowering trees such as magnolias.

Information about growing bonsai can be found on the Garden’s Web site, including how to miniaturize relatively unusual plants such as desert plants or succulents.

A Tranquil Respite

Both the Japanese Garden and the Bonsai Museum at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden give visitors the opportunity to personally experience the grace and tranquility of traditional Japanese horticultural design, and provide a quiet and soothing year-round respite from the bustling city. Information on hours, entrance fees and directions may be obtained at the Garden’s Web site.