Garden of the Nezu Museum, Tokyo

The garden of the Nezu Museum was not in my original plans for posting on the blog. I had intended to show the Moss Garden at Saiho-ji Temple in Kyoto and the gardens of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. While the moss garden was lovely and a great experience, all the photos tended to look the same and didn’t convey the beauty and spirit of the place. Our tour of the Imperial Palace gardens was instructive, although very limited and regimented, and the photos were not really very interesting. However, when Linda and I visited the small Nezu Museum on April 25, 2010, we were entranced by its garden. So I walked around it again taking photos.

The museum is in the fashionable Aoyama residential area. To the left of the main entrance there is a little dry garden. One turns right and goes down a long bamboo corridor which sets the appropriate quiet mood. Then one enters the modern building, recently reopened after a three-year reconstruction project.

The collection is small, but of outstanding quality.
 

This crab was created as a rest for the lid of the iron kettle.

The eighteenth century “Flowers of Summer” was our favorite screen.

The garden starts on the far side of the museum and goes down a hillside toward a pond.

You can see the roof of the free-standing museum café, which has a lovely view into the garden. Stone lanterns and pagodas are part of the museum’s collection. There are four old tea houses in the garden.