The Japanese style garden at Hillwood and its context

Magazine Antiques, March, 2003 by Kendall H. Brown

It is unusual to consider gardens in connection with antiques in general and Russian imperial objects in particular, especially a Japanese style garden built after World War II in the United States. Yet Marjorie Merri-weather Post (see p. 82, Pl. I) brought them all together at Hillwood. For her, the European antiques she purchased and the Japanese garden she commissioned shared several basic traits. Both were the exotic products of foreign cultures known for exquisite workmanship and for spirituality in art. Both were the kinds of trophies that helped define the status of the social elite on both sides of the Atlantic in the first half of the twentieth century. Nonetheless there were distinctions. In the case of her art collection, she was gathering objects originally made for others, while with her Japanese style garden she was the patron, commissioning an original. In the end, the Russian antiques brought her renown as a collector, while her Japanese style garden languished in obscurity until its two milli on dollar restoration in 2001 and 2002. (1)

Until very recently gardens outside Japan in the Japanese style have not been considered a distinct part of landscape history embodying a unique aesthetic. Instead they have most often been viewed as adjuncts to the glorious history of gardens in Japan, with their owners claiming that they are authentic Japanese gardens. This rhetoric persists despite the numerous differences between these gardens and premodern gardens in Japan in terms of design, plantings, and function. (2) What is unusual about the Hillwood garden--officially named Kyurin'en (Hill Wood Garden)--is that both Shogo Myaida (Pl. VI), its designer, and Marjorie Post acknowledged that their creation was a hybrid "American Japanese garden," as Myaida called it, to be used primarily as a setting for some of Marjorie Post's famous parties.

Given that Japanese style gardens outside Japan have existed in large numbers in virtually every part of the world for well over one hundred years, it makes sense to think of them as a separate category. While Japanese style gardens are usually "about" being Japanese, gardens in Japan serve various specific functions, including the representation of religious paradises, the poetic allusion to famous locales, or the elucidation of Confucian moral precepts.

There are of course some underlying similarities between Japanese and Japanese style gardens. These include the garden as a symbol of cultural sophistication, as a location for cultural role playing and temporary transformation, or as a place that offers escape from and thus implicit criticism of the dominant social and cultural order. To admit these functions of gardens is to admit that they serve as barometers of the patrons, designers, and societies that created them. Instead, most writers on Japanese style and Japanese gardens prefer to treat the garden as being purely for spiritual retreat and rejuvenation. It seems that neither Post nor Myaida considered the Hillwood garden in this way, but truthfully admitted its hybrid style and overtly social function.

When, like Myaida and Post, we consider Japanese style gardens in the United States as part of American landscape history, these gardens tell us how Americans have wanted to see Japan, and, because many of them were built by Japanese, they also tell us how the Japanese have wanted to be seen abroad. The Hillwood garden offers particular insight into both of these important phenomena in the social history of gardens.

In the absence of constant maintenance, gardens deteriorate, and because Japanese style gardens are usually recognized as having no value apart from being replicas of Japanese gardens, they are often altered to be more "authentic"--more like the generic "Japanese garden" discussed in innumerable popular books.

When we understand Japanese style gardens in their historical context, it makes sense to restore representative examples or those with unique historical value. The Japanese style garden at Hillwood, despite its lack of authenticity, falls into the latter category. It is a wonderful example of a postwar garden built on an American estate by one of the country's grandest cultural icons. It is the most elaborate extant garden built by Myaida, a notable garden designer who worked on the East Coast from 1922 to 1972. He firmly believed that Japanese garden aesthetics and functions had to be modified in the modern-day United States, and he strove to create American Japanese gardens.

Myaida was born on June 25, 1897, and died on May 13, 1989. He believed so much in translating Japanese culture to fit American customs that upon emigrating he even changed his family name from Maeda, which was hard to pronounce for most Americans, to Myaida, pronounced "my Aida." (3) He was born into a high-ranking family and raised in comfortable surroundings in the city of Takamatsu in Kagawa Prefecture on the island of Shikoku. His father, Suzuki Dengoro, served as a member of parliament before his premature death. The family's cultural achievement is indicated by the fact that one brother studied violin in Vienna and later played for the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, and another studied ornamental metalwork at the Imperial Fine Arts Academy in Tokyo, reportedly having one work acquired by the imperial family. After his father's death, Myaida and his mother moved to Tokyo where the young man was sent to a Christian church, baptized, and given the Christian name Joseph. He then studied at the experimental Agri cultural Forestry secondary school in Kanagawa Prefecture, adjacent to Tokyo, from 1914 to 1918. As part of his training, he helped build a villa for Count Matsuura at Oiso. After graduating he worked as an assistant to a professor at the architecture department of an art institute, probably the Imperial Art College in Tokyo. Around 1921 he became an assistant to Professor Honda Seiroku (1866-1952) of the forestry department of the Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo). In the summer of 1922, Myaida traveled to Europe to study garden history with a contingent of researchers from a midwestern American university led by Professor Philip Homer Elwood (b. 1884).