Hard to believe our beloved Japanese garden is 40this year. It is perhaps the most important 14 acres of our entire Missouri Botanical Garden, and most St. Louisans (myself included, until last week) probably don’t know its backstory. During one of the Garden’s monthly Member Speaker Series, I learned about the history behind one of North America’s largest Japanese gardens.
For starters, when it was commissioned in 1972, you could say the Missouri Botanical Garden was languishing; it hadn’t seen much change since 1917. True, the innovative Climatron, built in 1960, provided some much- needed excitement. Then in 1972, shortly after Dr. Peter Raven took the helm, a group from the St. Louis chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) proposed the idea of a Japanese garden. They saw it as a perfect upgrade for the large area heretofore known as ‘the North American Tract,’ basically a wooded arboretum. It already had a lake, one of the features necessary for a traditional Japanese garden. So, hosted by Stix Baer & Fuller, a gala was launched; Bal Orientale and its 900 guests raised the seed money. Our Japanese Garden was born.
Next, the JACL hired an innovative young architect, Koichi Kawana from Hokkaido, Japan, an expert in the new field of environmental design. He met with Raven and oversaw every feature of the new space himself. True to the Zen concept of Japanese gardens, it would inspire meditation and have all of the elements traditional to such a garden: waterfalls (a symbol of movement), correctly placed rocks (the space’s backbone), asymmetry (the rejection of perfection), raked gravel (a metaphor for Japan and its surrounding water) and lanterns (symbols of man’s presence in nature). Unlike, say, a rose garden or a water lily pond, it was designed to be not merely viewed, but experienced.
Mission accomplished. Anyone who has walked along its footpaths, bridges and boulders surely feels its transcendent aura—the way its trees hang over the lake, the mysteriousness of its half-hidden teahouse, the way earth and sky are reflected in its water. As for its significance to the Garden, and to St. Louis, that is immeasurable. It is among the most popular attractions here, swelling Garden membership to 44,000. It has impressed dignitaries for four decades, including Japanese Emperor Akihito, who visited in 1994. “It was the right garden in the right place at the right time,” said Garden archivist Andrew Colligan at the presentation. Forty years of history have borne that out.