Day 263: Storrier-Stearns Japanese Garden, Pasadena, California
📌APIA Every Day (263) - The Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden is a 1.45-acre landscape located in Pasadena, California, created as a private garden for Charles and Ellamae Storrier Stearns in the late 1930s. Situated on a six-acre estate that originally included a stately mansion built in 1913, the garden transformed a flat tennis court area into an intricate Japanese-style stroll garden. The project was an extensive undertaking, spanning four years and costing approximately $150,000, with all artifacts imported from Japan, including stones, bronze elements, and a complete teahouse that was disassembled in Japan and rebuilt on-site.
Kinzuchi Fujii, the landscape designer behind the garden, was a Japanese immigrant who brought meticulous craftsmanship and traditional design principles to the project. Spending a full year on design and planning before construction began, Fujii carefully integrated local California vegetation with imported Japanese design elements. He used mules to transport large boulders from the Santa Susana Mountains, strategically placing them to create waterfalls, stepping stones, and the foundation for a twelve-mat teahouse. The garden exemplified classic Japanese landscape techniques, including "shakei" (borrowed scenery) and "miegakure" (hide-and-reveal) principles, with Fujii stating his ambition to create "a real, uncompromising Japanese garden in the United States."
The garden's history was dramatically impacted by World War II. In 1942, Fujii was incarcerated at the Gila River War Relocation Center, despite having created this significant cultural landscape. He carefully preserved the garden's original plans in the single suitcase he was allowed to bring to the incarceration camp. After the war, the property changed hands several times, with the garden experiencing periods of neglect. In 1974, Caltrans seized 60 feet of the garden's eastern portion for a freeway extension, and the teahouse burned down in 1981.
In the mid-1990s, the garden was restored by Japanese American landscape designer Takeo Uesugi. Working with the Haddad family, who had inherited the property, Uesugi used Fujii's original plans to reconstruct the garden. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden is a documented example of pre-World War II Japanese landscape design in California, highlighting the work of Japanese designers Kinzuchi Fujii and Takeo Uesugi.
LEARN MORE:
National Archives Catalog: Storrier-Stearns Japanese Garden NRHP Form
Storrier-Stearns Japanese Garden: History Overview
Orientations: The Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden in Pasadena, California
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