The Japanese style garden at Hillwood and its context

Magazine Antiques, March, 2003 by Kendall H. Brown

Entering the United States after his European sojourn, Myaida settled in New York City. After working at a few odd jobs, he built a tearoom, garden, and house for a Japanese man living on Long Island and he helped redesign part of the Japanese garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. In 1923 he was commissioned to design an elaborate Japanese environment at Brenau College (now University), a small women's college in Gainesville, Georgia. There he spent three years constructing the pond, island, garden, and various structures at Camp Takeda--the college's summer camp for girls, built on a Japanese theme. (4) Myaida then traveled with a Brenau trustee, John Barns, to Palm Beach, Florida, where he worked for a well-known architect, who numbered Marjorie Post among his clients. Myaida worked briefly on her estate, Mar-A-Lago, in the employ of the landscape contractor Albert Lewis of Long Island.

Myaida returned to New York in 1926 to work with the Lewis and Valentine Company (c. 1918-1970), a landscape contractor, on Long Island. When he was laid off during the first years of the Great Depression, he started a small garden maintenance company and built a few small residential gardens on estates along the North Shore of Long Island. Myaida's next major commission was overseeing construction of the Japanese garden for the Japanese Pavilion at the World's Fair of 1939 in New York City. In the previous year he had given the paper "Gardening in America Today" at the national meeting of the School Garden Association of America in New York City, in which he argued for more professional training of American gardeners on the Japanese model. (5)

Throughout the depression years of the 1930s Myaida worked hard to find garden clients. In particular he targeted New York's wealthy suburbanites to whom he pitched the idea of a hybrid tea ceremony. In his essay "The Japanese Tea Ceremony in America and Europe" in an undated pamphlet for prospective clients, Myaida gives a capsule history of the wabi style tea ceremony and then states:

My idea is to develop this 'o cha no yu' in American life, using the spirit, motive and method of [tea master] Rikiu, bringing to the American Tea Party not only the spirit of congenial friendship, but a lovely ceremony and a knowledge of antiques. The construction of a small woodland temple for this Tea Ceremony would add a new interest to the American scene. American culture borrows from the civilized development of all ancient cultures and there is much that is lovely and interesting in this beautiful old ceremony displayed in its proper setting. (6)

He then provides a sixteen step "Outline of Course for New Tea Party" "The New American Tea party" or "The American 'O cha no yu' party" was to have a waiting arbor built along the driveway and then a tea temple in the woods constructed in any national style as long as it was harmonious with the taste of the hostess and the general surroundings. Then appropriately seasonal invitations were to be sent to guests who should be limited to four or five persons. Other steps outline the course of the ceremony, adapting the forms of the Japanese tea gathering to the milieu of American society ladies. For instance, step eleven was to "serve light lunch...in dim light--of unique menu--using antique dishes." (7)