Shinjuku Gyoen: The Estate That Named Shinjuku

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1. 1. Shinjuku Gate: The Lord's Horse

   You're just inside Shinjuku Gate, with the gatehouse close by and the lawns opening up beyond it. Every name around you starts here. In 1590 the warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu, newly arrived in Edo, granted this ground to one of his retainers, Naito Kiyonari. The garden's own history tells the legend of how the boundary was set: Naito could have as much land as he could ride around before his horse tired. About a century later the shogunate took back part of the Naito estate for a new stopping place on the Koshu road, the highway west out of Edo. It opened in 1699 as Naito Shinjuku, the Naito family's new post town. Inns, teahouses and stables grew along the road just north of this wall, and the name outlived all of them. The whole district of Shinjuku, the station, the towers you can see over the trees, is named after a stop for travellers and their horses at the edge of a lord's garden. The garden stayed private for three and a half centuries: a daimyo estate, then a farm laboratory, then an imperial garden. It opened to everyone on the 21st of May 1949. Entry cost twenty yen, and more than a million people came in the first ten months. The ring runs south-east from here, across the open lawn.

2. 2. The Landscape Garden: A Farm Laboratory

   You're at the edge of the Landscape Garden, the biggest open space in the park. Look across the lawn. Near its middle stands the tallest tree on it, a tulip tree, about thirty-five metres high, with the Shinjuku towers rising beyond it. That tree is a clue to what this ground was. In 1872, four years after the shoguns fell, the new Meiji government turned the old Naito estate into a laboratory for modern farming. The Naito Shinjuku Experimental Station grew about three thousand kinds of fruit and vegetables here, and kept silkworms and cattle. A school for agriculture opened on the site in 1874, and later moved away to become part of the University of Tokyo. Plants arrived from around the world to see what would grow in Japan. The tulip tree, from eastern North America, was one of them. The Ministry of the Environment's guide to the garden's big trees says tulip trees were first planted in Japan right here, and that many of the tulip trees along Tokyo's streets descend from them. Look for its leaves: they end square across the tip, as if someone had snipped them off with scissors. Around the start of May it holds up green and orange flowers shaped like tulips, in autumn the leaves go butter yellow, and in winter you can read the whole frame of it against the sky. In 1879 the farm passed to the imperial family, and in the early 1900s these lawns were shaped into an English landscape garden: open grass, loose groups of trees, nothing in straight lines. It's a garden meant to look as if nobody planned it, which takes a great deal of planning. The ring goes on east from here, to a small wooden house with blue-green trim.

3. 3. Kyu-Gokyu-sho: The House That Survived

   In front of you, on the lawn, stands a broad elm, and behind it a low wooden house with deep blue-green trim. Start with the tree. It's a harunire, a Japanese elm, about twenty-two metres tall. The Ministry's guide to the garden's big trees calls it a northern tree, rare here on the Kanto plain. Its kind belongs to the colder north of Japan, and this one has done well a long way from home. Look at the trunk: an elm's bark runs in long, rough ridges, like the grain of an old rope. Now the house. This is Kyu-Gokyu-sho, the Old Imperial Rest House, built in 1896 in the Western style, single storey, all wood. It stood beside the garden's greenhouse so the imperial family could rest here when they came to see the plants. In 1945 American air raids burned most of this garden. Only two of its buildings came through. This is one. The other is the Taiwan Pavilion, on the ponds in the south-west of the garden. In 2001 this house was named an Important Cultural Property, and it has been restored to the way it looked in the 1920s. The greenhouse is just east of here.

4. 4. The Old Conservatory: Glass Over Tokyo

   Just off the path are the remains of the old conservatory: footings marking where glass once stood. Greenhouses have stood on this corner since 1875. The first was small, about a hundred square metres. In 1892 a heated, Western-style glasshouse went up for orchids and tropical plants, and the Ministry of the Environment calls it Japan's first full-scale heated greenhouse. Gardeners here bred their own orchid hybrids and gave them the garden's name: Cattleya Shinjuku, Laelia Shinjuku, Coelogyne Shinjuku. The air raids of 1945 destroyed it. A new greenhouse opened in 1958, then the largest in Asia. That one closed in 2007, and the building beside you replaced it in November 2012: two thousand seven hundred and fifty square metres of glass, with around a thousand kinds of plants on display. Inside, it's always the same season: warm, wet and green, whatever the weather is doing out here. Two stories wait inside. Tap them on your list once you're through the door; they won't play on their own. The greenhouse opens at half past nine and closes a little before the garden does. Okido Gate is just to the east.

5. 5. Okido Gate: The End of the Aqueduct

   You're at Okido Gate. About a hundred and fifty metres east of here, out along the street, old stone memorials mark the end of one of the great works of Edo. In 1653 the shogunate began digging the Tamagawa aqueduct, an open channel to bring river water to the city. It runs about forty-three kilometres from the Tama River at Hamura, and over that whole distance it falls only about ninety-two metres. Its builders kept the water moving gently downhill the whole way, by eye, by lantern and by careful levelling. It ended there, at Yotsuya Okido, the great wooden gate where the Koshu road came into the city. From there the water went on underground in pipes to the houses of Edo. A water-guard station at the end let surplus water spill away into a stream, the upper Shibuya River, which ran down through the Naito estate. That spare water is the reason this garden has ponds. Almost everything that lives here, the fish, the turtles, the herons, the cherries leaning over the banks, grew up around it. Today the old channel is mostly gone, but a small stream runs again along the promenade outside the garden's north wall. Shinjuku Ward says it runs on groundwater pumped out of the road tunnel beneath you. The aqueduct's water, in a way, still arrives here, by a stranger route. The oldest of the ponds is just south of here, tucked into the trees.

6. 6. Tamamo Pond: The Oldest Garden

   This is Tamamo Pond, and it is the oldest part of the garden. In 1772 the Naito family, by then lords of the Takato domain in the mountains of Shinshu, finished a garden here and called it Tamagawa-en, after the aqueduct whose spare water filled it. Everything else in Shinjuku…

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7. 7. The Formal Garden: Paris by Way of Versailles

   Look down the rows of tall, pale-barked trees. Everything here runs in straight lines. This is the Formal Garden, and it was designed from France. In 1898 the garden got a new director, Fukuba Hayato, who had studied in France and Germany. Around 1900 he asked a Frenchman, Henri…

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8. 8. The Lower Pond: A Bridge That Isn't Wood

   Look at the little bridge over the water. The rails look like rough branches, knotted and bent. Now look closer, or touch them. They aren't wood. They're concrete. This bridge was built in 1905, during the French makeover, with a technique of moulding concrete into the shape and…

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9. 9. Middle Pond: Three Hundred Cherry Trees

   You're beside Middle Pond, and Sendagaya Gate is just behind you. If you came in that way, this is a fine place to begin. Look along the bank. These are Somei Yoshino cherries, about three hundred of them, and in late March and early April this bank turns pale pink and becomes…

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10. 10. The Taiwan Pavilion: A Wedding Gift

    Look across the water for a pavilion with a reddish roof whose ridges sweep up at the ends like a swallow's tail. Nothing else in the garden looks like it, because it comes from somewhere else. This is Kyu-Goryo-tei, the Taiwan Pavilion. In 1923 Crown Prince Hirohito, later the…

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11. 11. Upper Pond: From Duck Hunts to Stillness

    This is the Upper Pond, at the head of the chain. Look along it. The garden's own map calls the view from here particularly picturesque: water, islands, trees folded around the shore, and almost none of the city. There are three ponds in a line across the south of this garden,…

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12. 12. Rakuu-tei: Tea, Plums and Chrysanthemums

    Here is Rakuu-tei, a tea house set in a grove of plum trees. The building is from 1987, but there has been a resting place on this spot since 1881, when the first one served the imperial duck hunts at the Upper Pond. Today it serves tea and Japanese sweets. The plums here are…

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13. 13. Inside the Greenhouse: The Ogasawara Islands

    Find the room for the Ogasawara Islands. Ogasawara is part of Tokyo, but it lies about a thousand kilometres south of here, out in the Pacific, a day's journey by ship. The islands rose from the sea floor and were never joined to any mainland, so the plants that reached them…

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14. 14. Inside the Greenhouse: Orchids Named Shinjuku

    Find the orchids. Orchids are why this garden has a greenhouse at all. In 1892 the imperial gardeners built a heated glasshouse here for orchids and tropical plants, and they began breeding their own. Their hybrids were named after the garden: Cattleya Shinjuku, Laelia Shinjuku,…

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