Touring San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
My husband Laurent and I took our daughter Florence to the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to support her grade-school studies of Japanese.
I had lived in Japan as an exchange student and had gotten
my bachelor’s degree in Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, so I was
looking forward to the family field trip.
The Japanese Tea Garden’s website says that it was
originally created as a “Japanese Village” exhibit for the 1894 California
Midwinter International Exhibition. The
Japanese landscape architect who created the village stayed on and made many additions
to the park out of his own pocket.
He was later sent to a Japanese internment camp during World
War II and not allowed to return to the Tea Garden to live once released. I did not know this when we visited, but
details of the story are on the Garden’s website.
When my family began its visit of the Garden, I told Laurent
and Florence, “The orange pagodas here with the gray roofs are like the ones
you would find in Nara, Japan. Nara had
the most Chinese influence and is one of Japan’s oldest cities.”
The Tea Garden is taken care of very well with trimmed
plants and bushes everywhere. We walked
all throughout the five-acre park. I
pointed out things that were on the trail and let Florence know what they meant
even though they had been studying many of them at school.
She loved scampering up and down the drum bridge. I was afraid she might fall off of it,
because the arch is so high. Drum
bridges were built to let barges pass beneath them while people could still
cross canals.
The Garden’s paths were lined with toro, Japanese stone
lanterns. These are Buddhist and Chinese
in origin. In Buddhist temples, they
line the pathways leading to the temple.
Florence had fun looking at the koi, colored carp, which
were darting about in the ponds. Most
people call “koi” goldfish, but they are carp that are bred for color. Their most common colors are orange and red
and white together. Their colors often
match the flowers grown in Japanese gardens.
If the Japanese could breed carp for a pink color to match cherry
blossoms, I think they would do that, too.
Stepping stones throughout the Garden encourage you to slow
down and admire the architecture as well as the foliage. The Japanese plant symbolic plants and trees
in their gardens. Leaves on stepping
stones often lead the way to tea ceremony houses in Japan.
The Japanese Tea Garden has a zen garden that favors San
Francisco’s foggy climate. There are
many bushes and pruned trees in it instead of rocks and raked gravel as at the
Ryoanji garden that I had visited in Kyoto.
San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden reminded me of the
Suizenji Garden that I had visited in Kumamoto that featured the landscapes of
Japan’s Tokaido Road between Kyoto and Edo (modern-day Tokyo). A representation of Mount Fuji on the Tokaido
Road figures in Suizenji and the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco.
We finished our visit with tea in the Tea House, which
overlooks a pond. I had genmaicha (a
green tea blended with brown rice); Laurent had Chinese jasmine tea; and
Florence had delicate sencha, because it came in a teapot.
The Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park is a slice of
Japanese life; the people of San Francisco are very fortunate to have this
resource available to them.
By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
 |
| Ruth Paget Selfie |
