As I continue to document the beautiful gardens we visited in Japan this past April and May, I cannot leave out the significant gardens within the walls of Kyoto’s Nijo Castle, built in 1603 as home to the first shogun of the Edo Period Tokugawa Ieyasu.
The castle is just outside the Ninomaru Palace is the lovely strolling pond garden titled simply as “The Ninomaru Garden”. The Ninomaru Garden was designed by famous landscape architect and tea master Kobori Enshu (1579-1647). The garden is constructed around a large central pond decorated with a variety of stones of all shapes and sizes, and the pond also has three islands: Hōrai-jima (Island of Eternal Happiness), Tsuru-jima (Crane Island) and Kame-jima (Turtle Island). In 2006, the American magazine Journal of Japanese Gardening ranked Ninomaru Garden 8th out of 731 gardens all over Japan.
