FRESNO, Calif. — Shinzen Friendship Garden feels like a hidden gem.
It’s tucked in the back of a parking lot that you might miss as you’re winding your way through Woodward Park, further ensconced behind a large wooden gate, which only hints at the sprawling five-acre Japanese garden on the other side.
From this vantage point, just inside the gate, the view stretches over a grass field and across a tranquil lake. Through the trees on the other side, you catch only the slightest glimpse of the cars streaming down Friant Road. The noise does little to dampen the serenity.
It hums softly through the park, mingling with bird sounds and the rippling of water over falls and through stream beds.
The irony here is that Shinzen Friendship Garden isn’t all that hidden.
It’s one of Fresno’s most notable attractions, mentioned in online lists of things-to-do, right alongside Fresno Chaffee Zoo and Forestiere Underground Gardens.
On any given day you’ll find visitors strolling through the garden’s Ume Grove or stopped at the peak of the wooden foot bridge, watching the koi swimming below.
“We’re lucky,” said Roger Tsuruda, a volunteer gardener and docent at Shinzen for 13 years.
There are few Japanese gardens like Shinzen, he said. “Not like this. Not at this scale.”
The idea to have a Japanese garden here goes back to the late 1960s and the donation of the land that would become Woodward Park. It would take a full decade and several hundred thousand dollars before a portion of the garden was finally opened to the public in 1981.
Here are some things you may not know about the 40-plus-year-old landmark.
The mystery of the stone lantern
Shinzen is officially a friendship garden and was built partly in dedication to Kochi, Fresno’s sister city in Japan. It recognizes “the significant role of early Japanese immigrants and citizens in the founding and development of our community,” as written in a brief history on the garden’s website.
But it wasn’t the first Japanese garden in Fresno.
In the 1930s and ’40s there was a similar garden inside Roeding Park. That garden had some 100 blossoming cherry trees and an arched bridge that led to an island tea garden “with 1,000 lush, tropical plants that surrounded a beautiful, three-story wooden pagoda,” according to a story in The Fresno Bee.
There were two ponds, three fountains and an 11-foot, three-ton stone lantern that was brought in from Japan, as “a symbol of the friendship and cooperation between the United States and Japan,” The Bee wrote.
The garden was a highlight of the park until the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Within two years, the “oriental garden,” as even The Bee was referring to it by then, had all but been removed.
That included the lantern, which became the center of mystery that puzzled the city’s Parks Department and garden-history buffs for decades.
As the story goes, the lantern had been heavily vandalized and was just sitting in storage when then-Fresno Mayor George Dunn had city employees deliver it to the home of his longtime barber in 1964.
The barber kept the lantern, eventually giving it to his son, who made it a focal point of his backyard landscaping. The son, in turn, loaned the lantern to a friend, who needed a finishing piece for the koi pond at his home on Ashlan Avenue.
Members of a local koi association had even posed for pictures next to the lantern, without knowing anyone was looking for it.
The saga was documented in an in-depth story in The Bee in 1999, after police discovered and seized the lantern. The barber, John Lombardi, filed a $1.5 million suit against the city, alleging violations of their civil rights and improper seizure of personal property.
The lantern, which had been restored, was eventually gifted to Shinzen Gardens, where it remains on display.
It makes for one of the better stories when Tsuruda is guiding tours, though it “gets embellished,” he said.
Grants benefit garden
Nowadays, the garden is operated through the nonprofit The Shinzen Friendship Garden, Inc., which recently received two grants through Measure P’s Expanded Access to Arts and Culture program.
The program allocated $9.4 million to 87 area nonprofits. The garden’s two grants total more than $150,000.
One will go toward the general upkeep of the garden, which is mostly done by volunteers like Tsuruda, though the city is ultimately responsible for the park’s maintenance; what Tsuruda calls “the mowing and blowing.”
The volunteers are “down on their knees, in-the-dirt kind of people,” Tsuruda said. They can typically be seen milling about the gardens on Wednesday mornings pulling weeds and the like, though Tsuruda has been known to climb up inside the various pine trees to do some pruning. It’s never-ending work, he said.
Volunteers just discovered a giant boulder that had been covered over in jasmine.
“The place is so gigantic,” he said. “They had never noticed it before.”
A second, larger grant will go toward programs and events inside the garden, Executive Director Casey Lamonski said.
Shinzen hosts several established annual events, including the Fresno Koi show, plus a series of cultural demonstrations, classes and workshops.
It is currently in the middle of a beginners-level Japanese language course.
The grant will allow the garden to expand its offerings with author reading, poetry sessions and a speakers series.
Koi, peacocks, turtles
While wildlife isn’t the draw at Shinzen Garden, there is no shortage of it.
Peacocks can often be seen meandering though the grounds making mewing cries that sound like babies. A school of koi fish swims circles through the pond and makes popular viewing for guests.
The wildlife doesn’t come without its issues.
The peacocks, whose population once counted in the dozens, caused such havoc to the thatched roof of the garden’s Japanese tea house that there was talk of capturing and relocating them. The roof was eventually replaced by one less appealing to the birds.
Over the years, the garden’s koi fish have come under attack, both by people illegally fishing the pond and by a pair of massive die-offs that at one point decimated the population to just two fish.
In 2001, roughly 200 fish inexplicably died in a single day.
The population has since rebounded to dozens of fish, both in both the main pond and a smaller pond in the garden’s grove of Ume trees.
Those fish tend to be darker in color, Tsuruda says, to fend off the herons that sit on the rock looking for a meal.
There are also turtles milling about. They like to nibble the tails of the koi, Tsuruda said.
So, when he spots an errant turtle making his way over to the pond, he picks it up and relocates it lakeside. The turtle scurries down the bank, plops into the water and swims away. If you watch closely, you can see its head poke through the water.
Clark Bonsai Collection and museum
In 2015, Shinzen Garden announced it would take in the Clark Bonsai Collection.
Under an agreement with the Golden State Bonsai Federation, a collection of more than 100 trees was relocated to the garden from Hanford, Calif., and set on display. It became one of three such collections the federation operates in California. There are similar collections at Oakland’s Lake Merritt and San Marino’s Huntington Botanical Gardens.
The collection operates as a museum, with 20 to 25 trees featured in a display that rotates seasonally.
Bonsai is a Japanese art form of pruning tree branches and roots into miniaturized versions of full-grown trees. Some of the trees in the collection are considered the best examples of their kind in the world, said John Wright, the museum’s assistant curator.
There is also deep history in these trees. One is believed to be 1,500 years old.
Another was shown at the World’s Fair in San Francisco in 1915.
Another, a camphor tree, was grown from a seedling from a tree that survived the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. A full-sized version, seeded from the same tree, can be seen in the garden.
“The trees outlast us,” Wright said. “So, we’re caretakers.”
Entrance to the Clark Collection and museum is free during normal hours, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. on weekdays and 10 am.-4 p.m. on weekends, weather permitting.
Garden restaurants never came to be
For the many features that are part of Shinzen Garden, there is one that never made it past the idea stage.
In the mid-1990s, a plan was put forth to build a restaurant next to the garden. It even had buy-in from Fresno restaurateur and chef Ichiro Yoshino. The idea was eventually “postponed indefinitely in an effort to gather more public support for the idea,” according to a Fresno Bee story at the time.
It was floated again in 2007, this time with restaurant chain Benihana mentioned as a potential investor. That plan also failed to get support from city council, but the idea continued to get bandied around. It was mentioned in 2012 as part of a fundraising expansion plan that would have included a wedding chapel and cultural center.
