UCLA Japanese Garden - Letter from Calif. Garden & Landscape History Society to UCLA Chancellor

November 1, 2011 Chancellor Gene Block chancellor@ucla.edu UCLA Chancellor’s Office Box 951405, 2147 Murphy Hall Los Angeles, CA 90095 Dear Chancellor Block, A few weeks ago I learned of UCLA’s plans to sell the UCLA Hannah Carter Japanese Garden. I visited the garden last October 18 along with my colleague, Antonia Adezio, president of the Garden Conservancy. At that time, Brad Erickson explained your reasons for the sale.

I am writing to urge that before selling the garden you meet with professionals in landscape and garden preservation. These professionals can help you realize your goal of selling the property while assuring its preservation and continued public access as well as honoring the intent of Mr. Carter’s gift.

The California Garden and Landscape History Society’s mission is to celebrate the beauty and diversity of California’s historic gardens and landscapes. Through our journal Eden, our annual conference and other events we aim to promote wider knowledge, preservation, and restoration of California’s historic gardens and landscapes. Our members include garden lovers like me who are passionate about our garden heritage as well as professionals in the field of garden and landscape history and preservation.

Our 2007 annual conference, “California Japanese-style Gardens: Tradition and Practice,” was co-sponsored by the Japanese American National Museum, the Los Angeles Conservancy, and the Garden Conservancy in recognition of the importance of the topic to both the cultural history of Los Angeles and our national garden history. Through UCLA’s Extension Landscape Architecture program many of the conference attendees visited the Hannah Carter Japanese Garden as a pre-conference option.

The garden has always seemed to me the best example of a Japanese-style garden that we have in southern California. I recently asked Dr. Kendall H. Brown, professor of Asian Art, California State University, Long Beach and the leading scholar on Japanese-style gardens in America about the importance of the garden in relation to existing public Japanese-style gardens in southern California.

He replied in an e-mail that “[the UCLA Hannah Carter Japanese Garden] is the biggest and best private, residential [Japanese-style] garden built in America in the immediate post-war period and thus

demonstrates the rapid embrace of Japanese culture in the wake of World War II. It also shows, for the time, a new sophistication in American domestic culture, in which garden styles including “California patio,” “Hawaiian tropical” and “Japanese teahouse” are combined into something that is distinctly American and wonderfully Californian. …The Carter garden is also important because it represents the garden design of two of the leading figures who created Japanese gardens in the mid-20th century. The garden was designed by Nagao Sakurai, who later created civic Japanese gardens in San Mateo and Spokane, as well as many leading private gardens. Sakurai was chosen by the Japanese government to build the Imperial Japanese Gardens for the 1939 international expositions in San Francisco and New York, and is a major figure in modern garden history. The Carter garden was one of the first gardens he made after immigrating to the US in the 1950s. …

“After a mudslide damaged the Carter Garden in 1968, redesign was directed by Koichi Kawana, a member of the UCLA facilities staff and life partner of UCLA Dean Caroll Parish. The Carter Garden was one of Kawana’s first projects, and helped launch his career. In the 1970s and 1980s he became the leading Japanese garden designer in North America. … Locally, he created important Japanese gardens at the Tillman Water Reclamation facility in Van Nuys and at Lotusland in Montecito.”

In light of the above, I hope you will reconsider your present plans to remove artifacts from the garden and to list the garden for sale without restrictions. We would be happy to assist in the process by connecting you with individuals and organizations that can provide help in assuring that the UCLA Hannah Carter Japanese Garden is preserved.

Sincerely,

Judy M. Horton President, California Garden and Landscape History Society 323 462-1413 jhorton@jmhgardendesign.com www.cglhs.org

cc: Brad A. Erickson, Executive Director UCLA Campus Service Enterprises 10920 Wilshire Blvd. Ste. 825, LA 90024 berickson@ucla.edu Antonia Adezio, President The Garden Conservancy aadezio@gardenconservancy.org