Of the world’s major gardening traditions, the Japanese style is probably the easiest to recognize and love, but it is also among the easiest to get wrong.
So many suburban gardens boast an element of the genre: the stone lantern, the red maples or the trickling fountain. But they lack the spirit. Rather than evoking a vast natural panorama with a few artful touches, they are simply gardens–nice places, sure, but without the power to inspire found in a really masterful Japanese garden.
Fortunately, when John Anderson of Rockford took a liking to Japanese gardens a little more than two decades ago, he did it right.
Anderson got the bug on a 1978 visit to a Japanese garden in Oregon. Later that year he enlisted its Portland-based landscape architect, Hoichi Kurisu, to visit his 11-acre lot in Rockford and see if it could be turned Japanese. In the years since, the efforts of Kurisu, Anderson and others have transformed 5 acres of this perfectly nice, big but ordinary lot into a majestic place, a horticultural spectacle unmatched anywhere else in or near Chicago.
The thunder of a 50-foot artificial waterfall whose craggy boulder face is dotted by junipers and azaleas compliments the placid glassiness of a 1/3-acre pond. In the pond stand rock islands that play tricks on the eye–are they mountainous land masses far out to sea or miniature promontories less than a hundred feet off?
Pruning is elevated to a high art at Anderson Gardens, where a tree that, in another landscape, would look like nothing more than a mass of greenery with a trunk at the bottom, has been sculpted via pruning saws to reveal its trunk meandering through carefully placed layers of greenery. Shrubs are pruned intensively, as well, and each one turns out to have its own twisted, aged and seemingly chiseled shape, instead of all of them being indistinct mounds of leaf.
A subtle composition
Here and there are bridges, gates, a teahouse and a viewing pavilion, all in authentic historical Japanese styles and most of them built by Tokyo carpenters flown in for the job.
The garden is a period design, reflecting the big ideas that dominated Japanese gardening in the 12th Century. Most visible among these at Anderson is the way bloom color is downplayed. Most plants here are selected for their contribution to the overall tableau, which doesn’t change much during the growing season. Blooms, when they show up, are just icing on an already tasty cake. It’s not a garden of perennials and annuals, but a subtler composition that relies on lines and shapes more than on colors.
It’s a tour of endless amazements, not least has been that, until this year, the whole captivating place was one family’s back yard. Six years into developing his sometimes sloped, sometimes swampy lot into an exotic marvel, Anderson–a third-generation member of a family whose unspecified fortune comes from various businesses, including packaging–began opening it for public tours intermittently. Gradually the schedule grew to include openings seven days a week.
This spring, Anderson and his wife, Linda, faced the reality that what was once their back yard had become a public gem. Now it’s no longer theirs. On June 1, they spun it off as a free-standing not-for-profit institution, called Anderson Gardens, with its own supporting endowment of nearly $5 million.
Now there is a garden shop and a more open tour schedule–just show up anytime the garden is open; no more need to make reservations and be guided along the paths by a staff member. In addition, says director Julia Lo, the five developed acres will be supplemented in the next three to four years with a new pond and gardens, bringing the total developed area to 7.4 acres.
The garden’s new status ensures its future as a treasure anyone in Chicago who appreciates horticulture or Japanese creative arts really has to see. But another way its future is ensured is with the plants themselves. Although they are positioned, pruned and maintained to create a Japanese effect, they are all plants that thrive in our harsh Midwestern climate. That means that any of the effects, grand or intimate, that you like at Anderson Gardens could be duplicated in your own yard.
Better start saving up that endowment right now, just in case you get as far along the Japanese path as John Anderson did.
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Anderson Gardens is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $4 for adults, $3 for seniors, $2 for students, and free for children 4 years old or younger. For information, call 815-877-2525
How to get to Anderson Gardens from Chicago: Take the Northwest Tollway, Interstate Highway 90, to the Business 20/East State Street interchange near Rockford and exit going west. Drive two miles to Mulford Road and turn right, heading north. Drive another two miles to Spring Creek Road, and turn left, heading west. Follow Spring Creek Road to its intersection with Parkview Avenue, where you will find the gardens’ entrance.
