Tea Gardens of the Bay Area: Saratoga

Having visited the Japanese tea gardens in San Mateo and San Francisco, I decided it was finally time to head down to Saratoga to see the Hakone Gardens, a site I only recently learned about.

Nestled at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains on the Silicon Valley side of the range in Saratoga, California, the Hakone Gardens are in interesting mix of Japan and Northern California. The site looks impressively Japanese—it's the most "Japanese" of the three I visited—and yet it's also unmistakably part of Northern California. The smell of the forest, that dense lushness I associate with camping trips amongst towering trees and moss, permeated everything and kept me grounded in where I actually was.

The Hakone Gardens were started in 1915 by a San Francisco socialite couple who were intrigued by the Japanese section of the Pan-Pacific Exhibition held that year in San Francisco. After visiting Japan themselves, including the Hakone region, they set about creating their own slice of Japan in the South Bay.

Two particularly impressive aspects of the garden are the Upper House, which was built in the traditional style (without nails) as a place to do moon viewing (tsukimi) in August.

I also really like the Kizuna-En, the bamboo garden. If it weren't for that ever-present scent of Northern California moistness I could easily have imagined myself at some zen temple in Kamakura.

Other ways you can tell you're not in Japan:

The carp don't beg because no one feeds them...

And there's graffiti on the bamboo. For shame.

Well worth the trip if you're in the Bay Area.

More photos available here.