A Cherry Tree Grows in Brooklyn

The Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden in Prospect Park was the first Japanese garden to be created in an American public garden. Constructed in 1914 and 1915 it is the masterpiece of its creator, landscape designer Takeo Shiota. It's the most visited Japanese-inspired garden outside Japan.

The garden is a blend of the ancient hill-and-pond style in which various landscape features are gradually revealed along winding paths such as hills contoured around a pond, a waterfall, and an island with carefully placed rocks. Among the major architectural elements are wooden bridges, stone lanterns, a viewing pavilion, and a Shinto shrine.

Design principles are simplicity and asymmetry, man-made and natural, impermanence and constancy. Pine trees symbolize permanence. Brightly colored flowering plants are used with restraint. Plants include, Japanese irises, wisteria, Japanese maples, and azaleas. Flowering cherries, which mark the season of Hanami (flower viewing), grace the shoreline. The fleeting blooms of these trees allude to the transitory nature of life. Most of the largest trees-white pine, American beech, and bald cypress-are native to North America and were planted before the site was developed.

Some of the pines are pruned and trained to look old and windswept, and some of the trees and shrubs are tightly clipped to represent hills and clouds. Hats off to the Brooklyn workers and volunteer gardners. Decades of highly skilled pruning and maintenance have produced living works of art and this little Blip.

(ancient rock tripod / 85mm / Photomerge)