Fort Worth Japanese Garden – Fort Worth, Texas
The Fort Worth Japanese Garden is a 7.5-acre (3.0 ha) Japanese Garden in the Fort Worth Botanic Garden. The garden was built in 1973 and many of the plants and construction materials were donated by Fort Worth’s sister city Nagaoka, Japan. Attractions at the garden include a zen garden, a moon viewing (tsukimi) deck, waterfalls, cherry trees, Japanese maples, a pagoda, and fish food dispensers to feed the hundreds of koi in the Japanese Garden’s three ponds. The garden hosts two annual events, the Spring Festival and the Fall Festival, featuring demonstrations of Japanese art and culture.
The Fort Worth Japanese Garden was completed in 1973. It is a traditional strolling garden with winding paths through the landscapes and around ponds. The garden consists of 7.5 acres filled with cherry trees, Japanese maples, magnolias, bamboo, bridges, and ponds filled with koi fish.
Except in the spring, there are few flowers blooming in the Japanese Garden due to the Japanese practice of Mono no Aware. Mono no Aware translates to “transient/bittersweet beauty”, meaning if the garden was always blooming, it would never be special.
The Fort Worth Japanese Garden was originally constructed with materials donated by numerous individuals, businesses, and institutions in North Texas and elsewhere in the USA. In the 1990s, Fort Worth’s Japanese sister city, Nagaoka, donated an authentic Mikoshi (a sacred palanquin) to Fort Worth, which is currently housed within the garden’s precincts. Several trees, including pines and flowering cherries, were similarly donated. Finally, Mr. Shigeichi Suzuki, a landscape architect from Nagaoka, donated plans for a karesansui-style addition to the Garden in 1997. The addition was completed in 2000, and is now called the ‘Suzuki Garden’.
The Fort Worth Japanese Garden was built into a little valley, originally a gullied bluff, that opened onto the floodplain of the Trinity River’s Clear Fork branch. Enlarged as a gravel quarry, the site also served at various times as a watering hole for cattle, a trash dump, and a squatter’s camp. Today, the secluded valley serves as a Japanese-style ‘stroll garden’ (kaiyushiki teien).
Built-in the tradition of Edo-period (1600-1868) stroll gardens, the Fort Worth Japanese Garden integrates several Japanese styles of garden design into a single landscape. Examples of the ‘Hill-and-Pond’ (tsukiyama rinsentei), ‘Dry Landscape’ (karesansui), ‘Tea Garden’ (roji), and ‘Enclosed-Garden’ (tsubo niwa), types are all expressed there. In addition, the garden features architectural elements derived from venues historically associated with Japanese gardening. These include Buddhist temples, Imperial villas, the estates of Samurai lords, and the townhouse gardens of wealthy merchants.
Two karesansui (dry landscape) exhibits at the Fort Worth Japanese Garden are evocative of rivers that originate in mountainous terrain. One of them begins adjacent to the garden’s ‘Pavilion’, and ‘flows’ down a winding, boulder-lined channel, to a small lake or sea. Here, the ‘water’ consists entirely of ornamental gravel, and can be viewed from several levels along its length. The other exhibit is near the garden’s ‘Moon-Viewing’ deck. Like the first, it begins in a group of boulders that are intended to suggest a craggy range of mountains. This ‘river’ of mixed cobbles then descends along a terraced, boulder-lined channel, that is, in turn, surrounded by a berm of fine-textured turf. It disappears in the midst of several large boulders, like a river descending into a canyon.