This Tudor-style estate (opposite) – the former home of Michael Bakwin, a supporter of the New York Botanical Garden and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden – features magnificent landscaping, including this Japanese rock garden. Courtesy Daniel Milstein Photography.
THE ZEN OF THE JAPANESE GARDEN BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA It is a place that allows you immediately and continuously to exhale, offering refreshment for mind, body and spirit. The Japanese garden is not like our traditional Occidental gardens. Where we might seek a profusion of greenery and a riot of color — carefully manicured, of course — with follies and ornamental sculpture in the grander designs, the elegantly spare Japanese garden draws on the basic elements of water, rock and sand, with curated flowers, trees and structures that speak to Buddhist teachings and a sense of the eternal.
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WAGMAG.COM
AUGUST 2019
Among the best-known public Japanese-style gardens in our area is the one found at Kykuit, the historic Rockefeller family home in Pocantico Hills. Created over two years (1908-10) by architect William Welles Bosworth — who also did the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Cambridge campus and the AT&T building in Manhattan — Kykuit’s Japanese Garden originally featured a brook spanned by two wooden bridges that fed a pond bordered by massive boulders and a mahogany teahouse nestled in a grove of blue spruces. In the 1960s, then-
Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, Kykuit’s last owner, had landscape architect David Harris Engel expand and renovate the site to include a new teahouse; stone paths, ornaments, lanterns and a bridge; dramatic water effects; an area of raked sand; a bamboo grove; and plantings of cherry trees, azaleas and moss, all traditional to a Japanese garden. Farther up the Hudson River in Ossining you’ll find the former Michael Bakwin estate, which is now on the market. Bakwin, who passed away in December, was a supporter of the New York