John P. Humes Japanese Stroll Garden

Mill Neck, NY

In many gardener’s minds Japanese gardens are among the most spiritual, evocative expressions of what is capable on the ground with plants. It just comes with the territory. Some people can quiet their thoughts with the mere memory of meditative, inspiration-generating chikurin no oto—the sound of the bamboo grove.

That Japanese gardens are planted around the world in various iterations is testament to the style’s enduring significance and influence. There are more than 300 in the United States alone. The Humes Japanese Stroll Garden in Mill Neck, Long Island in New York is one that uniquely integrates ageless Japanese landscape techniques with the woodland terrain of Long Island’s North Shore.

Japanese garden style evokes and symbolizes humanity’s special relationship with nature and the wider universe. Humes’ original designer Douglas DeFaya, born in Hokkaido as Shoju Mitsuhashi, was not classically trained and used gardening—not strict tradition and styles—and his experience as a Japanese American during World War II, to create his artistry. Defaya was conscious of the four seasons and endeavored to create a layered garden—with heaven, earth, and sea—an abstraction of nature within the architecture of the place and its tea house. His earliest garden assistant, James Petry, who, as a teenager helped install the garden, understood, “What makes people garden the most is that it’s an escape to another world.”

Ambassador John P. Humes, founder of the garden and its owner for decades, was inspired by a visit to Japan and wanted a semblance of that “other world” within which to escape. He managed to enjoy it briefly before his world took him from it to a post in Austria. Years of benign neglect took their toll, the property bereft of the attention a maintenance-hungry garden needs. Upon his return in the late 70s, restoration efforts began and a foundation to own the garden was created.

Preserving gardens is not just about maintenance. It is “constantly tuning the harmony between the elements, and the sky and the space,” says Belgian landscape architect Francois Goffinet, who completed this restoration of the garden early on in his career. It is this kind of layering and sequencing that brought into alignment long-term plans to ensure the garden’s future.

In the early 90’s the Conservancy became involved and from that point on until 2015, provided management support of the garden, offered public programs, restored the tea house, and planned for the garden’s future. The Garden Conservancy was able to serve as a bridge, linking the garden with a larger local effort to protect critical land, when it was purchased by the North Shore Land Alliance (NSLA). Today, the two-acre garden completes a 150-acre green corridor that the NSLA tends to protect a local watershed. It’s also been enshrined as one of the charter gardens in the Conservancy’s Documentation Program, an online storehouse of written, visual, and recorded information to keep gardens alive in a new way.

“There is the way we touch and shape the world. And the way it touches and shapes us,” notes John Peter Keane. The soft, irenic clacking of bamboo on bamboo; each stone telling its own story on the path; light dripping through leaves of every shade of green; water, and people; this is how the Humes Japanese Stroll Garden touches its visitors and lifts them to another reality.

Like the best gardens, the Humes Japanese Stroll Garden is transformative. It is the way. It is a place to restore and nourish the human spirit.

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