UCLA鈥檚 Hannah Carter Japanese Garden Facing Uncertain Future
One of the pre-eminent examples of post-War, residential Japanese-style gardens 鈥 the Hannah Carter Japanese Garden 鈥 is under threat. The garden was designed in 1959 by Nagao Sakurai and Kazuo Nakamura, and subsequently purchased through a gift to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with the understanding that the university maintain the site in perpetuity. The university now plans to sell the garden and they have removed important character-defining elements including a five-tiered stone pagoda.
Photo by Maynard L. Parker, courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California
History
In 1923, Los Angeles landscape architect A. E. Hanson created a Hawaiian inspired rural retreat, for his client Harry Calendar, in the exclusive Bel Air subdivision. In 1959, after the property鈥檚 sale to oilman Gordon Guiberson, noted Japanese garden designer Nagao Sakurai was commissioned to create a Japanese style garden on the steep one-and-one-half-acre hillside located below the residence. Sakurai, a recent immigrant to the U.S. had previously designed the Imperial Japanese Gardens at the 1939 international expositions in San Francisco and New York. By 1961 Sakurai and Kazuo Nakamura, a renowned garden expert from Kyoto, had transformed the casual California country place into an exquisite Japanese garden.
Sakurai and Nakamura sculpted a dramatic garden, inspired by those in Kyoto, into the steep hillside, using 400 tons of lichen-covered stones from Santa Paula Canyon north of Los Angeles, and another several hundred stones from rock quarries at Mt. Baldy east of the city. Many of the garden鈥檚 elements were imported from Japan. The entry gate, family shrine and teahouse overlooking the pond, were built in Ja