Japanese Gardens turns 35

The Earl Burns Miller Japanese Garden at CSULB marks its 35th anniversary this fall with appreciation of the past and anticipation for the future.

“It’s an exciting time,” said garden director Jeanette Schelin, a member of the university since 1993 and co-founder and past vice president of the North American Japanese Garden Association (NAJGA). “Gardens usually take 30 years to mature. That was something Ed Lovell, the garden’s designer and landscape architect for the campus, used to say. Loraine Burns Miller and he envisioned a garden for a generation of people they would never know. Their vision of the physical garden has become fully mature.”

 

On Friday, Sept. 16, the garden will mark it 35th anniversary with a 6-9 p.m. fundraiser. Admission is $70 per person to celebrate under the full harvest moon.

The School of Art’s Ken Brown, author of Japanese-Style Gardens of the Pacific West Coast that included CSULB’s Japanese Garden, is the founder and past president of NAJGA.

“We are thinking less today of Japanese gardens as microcosms of Japan that teach us about culture,” he said. “Now, we think of them more as microcosms of nature formed manicured in a Japanese style. Because they are idealizations of nature, the larger goal is not to learn about Japan. The goal is to connect with the power of nature in diverse ways.”

Schelin believes the mission of the garden is to be a place of learning and culture.

“Loraine Burns Miller wanted a garden that created an ‘aesthetic respite,’” she said. “I think that was an interesting phrase. She had health problems in her youth yet she became curator for 25 years of the Howard Oriental Art Collection. She knew how art could be restorative and invigorating. She decided she wanted to give Long Beach another gift and that gift was the Japanese Garden.”

Brown, whose 2013 book Quiet Beauty: The Japanese Gardens of North America explores the history and social impact of Japanese gardens, lectures around the nation every year including stops this fall in San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Washington D.C., Ithaca, NY and Taipei. In 2009, he and Schelin organized an international conference on Japanese gardens outside Japan on campus that drew 240 attendees and 44 speakers from five countries.

“That,” he said, “inspired the foundation of the NAJGA to foster the sustainability of Japanese gardens, both private and public, by thinking of them in terms of horticulture, human culture and business culture.”

Over the years, Schelin has worked hard with community support to create a menu of activities for the garden.

“We know our garden naturally attracts families,” she noted. “For instance, we host a Children’s Day every year plus July’s Tanabata Festival or the Festival of the Star-Crossed Lovers, a romantic festival that involves taking strips of paper, writing poetry on them, attaching them to bamboo and letting the wind take the poems up to Heaven. It’s lovely.

“I remember my first Chrysanthemum Festival at CSULB,” she added. “My first thought was that adults would do adult activities and kids would do art. But I quickly discovered many adults tried to do the art activities with the children. Since then, our adults are included in all artistic activities. It is open to everyone from ages 2 to 92.”

Weddings continue to play a big part in the garden, but they have evolved.

“In the 1980s, reservations were made by phone,” Schelin recalled. “Married couples visited Public Safety to pick up the key to the garden and let themselves in without any equipment, no PA system and no food. They used the space then returned the key.” Today, reservations are needed months in advance for the big day (or evening), with the garden able to accommodate up to 200 guests for a ceremony and 150 for a wedding and reception.

Looking to the garden’s future, Schelin envisions a connection with an academic home, noting that linking academically to the core purpose of this institution is strategic.