After a Garden Is Finished

A Curator of a Living Work

Sugiyama graduated from Chiba University’s Faculty of Horticulture and completed graduate work in environmental planning. After years of professional landscape work and a move to Canada, he became curator of Nitobe Memorial Garden in 2010.^[1][2]

When I first learned that his title was curator, I found it intriguing. The word usually brought museums and art galleries to mind, rarely gardens.

In an interview with Chiba University, he described the garden curator as the person with overall professional responsibility for the garden. Which direction should it take? Which plants should be replaced? How should its care be organized? Each decision has to be made with the garden’s long-term future in mind.^[1]

A museum curator works with objects and collections. A garden curator is responsible for a work that grows, ages, and responds to climate, disease, and human use.

Curator is a fitting title for someone responsible for a garden.

When people think of caring for a garden, they often picture pruning, weeding, sweeping leaves, and cleaning ponds—the visible work of maintenance. Sugiyama has used the word foster to describe this work. It suggests nurturing and supporting growth, and aptly describes what a gardener does for a living garden: not freezing it at the moment of completion, but understanding its original design and helping it continue to grow as plants, climate, and time bring change.^[3]

From Kannosuke Mori to Ryo Sugiyama

The garden was created in memory of Inazo Nitobe and his contributions to relations between Japan and Canada.^[4]

There is another intriguing connection here.

Kannosuke Mori, the designer of Nitobe Memorial Garden, also came from Chiba’s tradition of horticultural and landscape education. He studied at the Chiba Higher School of Horticulture, a predecessor of Chiba University’s Faculty of Horticulture, and later taught there for many years. Decades later, Sugiyama graduated from the Faculty of Horticulture.^[4]

Mori and Sugiyama were not directly teacher and student. But one of Sugiyama’s professors at Chiba had studied under Mori, and Sugiyama himself has described Mori as a distinguished predecessor at the university. Through his professor, Sugiyama belongs to a teaching lineage that reaches back to the garden’s designer.^[1][2]

Mori came to Vancouver in 1959 and spent fourteen months directing the garden’s design and construction. Half a century later, another landscape professional from Chiba University was making decisions in that same garden about how its plants should grow and which spaces should be preserved.^[4]

On the other side of the Pacific, that line of teaching had found its way back to the garden Mori left behind.

If foster describes nurturing a garden that is still growing, then, for a garden with this history and cultural significance, I find stewardship better expresses the responsibility that spans generations. One generation takes charge of it for a time, understands the earlier design, cares for it and makes decisions, then hands it on to those who follow.

Pruning a Tree, Preserving a Space

Plants do not stop growing on the day a garden is finished.

Tree canopies thicken year by year, gradually closing a view that was once open toward the water. Branches extend over paths, changing the light and shade beneath them. As shrubs grow taller, stone arrangements recede into the foliage. When the edge of a pond loses its definition, the relationship between water, stone, and land begins to blur.

An individual tree can be perfectly healthy while the garden around it slowly loses its design.

Nitobe Memorial Garden is in Vancouver, where rainfall, pruning seasons, and plant growth differ from those in Japan. Sugiyama cannot simply apply Japanese methods by rote. When pruning, he considers how to leave room for air, light, and movement while allowing the garden to feel as though it had grown naturally.^[2]

Pruning in a Japanese garden is particularly demanding. Trees shaped by human hands must still feel natural, and each tree’s height, density, and branch direction have to be judged in relation to the entire garden.

Before removing a branch, the gardener has to ask: what would it obscure if left in place, and what would change if it were cut? Light and views, as well as the proportions between trees, stones, water, and architecture, all enter into the decision. The branch kept or removed today will also influence growth several years from now.

How Gardens Affect Us

The study Sugiyama later sent me deepened my understanding of how gardens affect the way we look, how we feel, and how our bodies respond.

Co-authored by Sugiyama and other researchers, the study compared Japanese and Canadian university students’ responses to three garden styles: a landscape garden, a Japanese garden, and an architectural garden. The researchers recorded eye movements, heart-rate variability, and participants’ impressions after viewing each space.^[5]

The results showed that different gardens elicited different patterns of looking and physiological responses. The Japanese garden prompted more visual fixations. Participants showed higher parasympathetic activity when viewing the landscape garden and more often perceived it as close to nature. Cultural background also affected how participants looked at and responded to the gardens.

The point was not to rank one garden style above another. The study showed that spatial composition influences where we look and may also elicit physical and emotional responses.

This made me think that the relationship between gardens and health may not be as simple as “greenery makes people feel better.” A garden’s composition guides how our eyes move and where they pause; different ways of looking may be accompanied by different physical and emotional responses.

Another study, published in 2025, compared Murin-an in Kyoto with a garden that contained similar elements but was less well composed and maintained. At Murin-an, participants’ gaze ranged more widely and moved more rapidly. Drops in pulse rate and improvements in mood were also more pronounced. The researchers suggested that the overall composition of the garden’s elements and its state of care together influenced viewers’ responses.^[6]

Original design and later maintenance are difficult to separate completely. What visitors encounter is the garden that the two have shaped together over many years.

Design establishes the relationships among trees, water, stones, paths, and architecture. Maintenance determines whether those relationships remain legible years later.

We tend to think of garden maintenance as simply keeping a garden looking tidy. We less often consider that the density of foliage and the opening or closing of views may affect not only how we feel while looking at a garden, but also measurable bodily responses, such as changes in pulse rate.

Designing for a Garden Years Ahead

When Chisao Shigemori designed a garden for us, he repeatedly considered what its trees would look like years later.

He took both their growth rates and the forms they might eventually develop into account before deciding on species and positions.^[3]

At the moment a garden is completed, many of its trees are not yet fully grown. The designer has to look beyond their size at planting and imagine how, five or ten years later, they will relate to the architecture, stone arrangements, paths, and light.

Some gardens only reach maturity many years after they are finished.

The designer anticipates how plants will grow. The gardener makes adjustments, again and again, once that growth actually occurs. Maintenance is design continuing through time.

A Garden Also Needs Long-Term Commitment

When I visited Rikugien, I thought about how the garden’s history stretched far beyond the lifetime of any one designer or owner.

Rikugien is one of Tokyo’s leading Edo-period daimyō gardens. Under the direction of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, seven years of work beginning in the late seventeenth century transformed flat ground into a strolling garden of ponds and artificial hills, with scenes inspired by places celebrated in waka poetry. Along with Koishikawa Korakuen, it is known as one of Edo’s two great gardens. Today it is designated a Special Place of Scenic Beauty by the Japanese government.^[7]

By the early Meiji period, Rikugien had fallen into neglect. After Yatarō Iwasaki acquired it in 1878, the Iwasaki family undertook extensive restoration, bringing water back into its ponds. After his death, Yanosuke and Hisaya Iwasaki continued the work, transplanting tens of thousands of trees from woodlands, bringing in garden stones from various regions, and building several teahouses.

By the time the garden was donated to the City of Tokyo in 1938, the Iwasaki family had owned, restored, and cared for it for sixty years.^[7]

The Rikugien we see today has survived through several generations’ investment of time, labor, and resources.

Its history also makes clear that even a celebrated garden can fall into neglect when it goes without care for too long. A garden endures because someone later is willing to take responsibility for it.

Another garden I have visited is Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle.

This extensive garden and woodland property was transferred to the University of Washington in 1970, and later to the Arbor Fund, a nonprofit established for its long-term care. Walking through its forests, lawns, ponds, and gardens, it is easy to understand why looking after such a place requires a whole organization.^[8]

Bloedel Reserve keeps records of the origins, locations, health, and changes over time of its living collections, allowing new caretakers to make decisions based on long-term knowledge.^[8] Almost invisible to visitors, these records make the garden’s past a guide for those who will care for it next.

Rikugien and Bloedel Reserve are far larger than residential gardens and cannot be compared directly with them. They simply make the same point on a larger scale: gardens do not preserve themselves. Their continued existence requires skilled people, enough time, and the resources and institutions to sustain that work.

Someone Still Has to Know How to Read the Garden

When we enter a garden, we usually remember its designer, along with the pond, trees, and stones before us. We rarely think about the people who, years after it was completed, still watch how branches grow, how light changes, and what each cut might do.

The better this work is done, the less visible it becomes.

Visitors simply feel that the garden has always been this way. They do not see the years of subtle judgment behind every scene that appears natural.

Sugiyama’s work is not merely to keep the garden tidy. He has to understand why Mori designed it as he did, decide how Japanese techniques should be adapted to Canada, pass on his knowledge to students, and use research to understand how gardens affect the way people look and feel.

When Mori built the garden, he taught construction and maintenance techniques to the local Japanese Canadian gardeners who assisted him.^[4] In our later correspondence, Sugiyama also told me that he teaches UBC students how to care for the garden and how to prune trees in a Japanese garden.^[3]

A garden understood by only one person remains fragile. Skills and judgment have to be taught, and others need time to learn them through actual work.

This work demands a high level of expertise, sustained patience, and a strong sense of responsibility. It rarely stands in the spotlight, yet it determines whether, years from now, a garden will still retain its original character.