Becoming the Garden's Gardener: The Japanese Tea Garden, part 2

I’ve always known the Japanese Tea Garden was a special place; I appreciated its soothing atmosphere in a vague blurry way. But, like visiting a museum with someone who’s knowledgeable about art, spending time there with supervising gardener Steven Pitsenbarger helped me understand it in a whole new way.

That’s a journey Pitsenbarger himself has been on for the past 17 years. He had little gardening experience and was still working on a degree in horticulture at City College when he got a job with Rec and Park and was assigned to the Tea Garden in 2007. He knew nothing about the 1,500-year tradition of Japanese gardening in general or the painful history of this particular garden. He hadn’t asked to be assigned to the Tea Garden, Yet within two weeks of starting there, he knew it was where he wanted to spend his career. “I'm like, I think I found my spot,” he recalled.

Steven Pitsenbarger by his favorite part of the Tea Garden.

A colleague would later tell him, “a garden can never be better than the gardener.” Pitsenbarger is not the sort of person to fumble along in a job. As he put it, “I’m not going to be the guy working in the plumbing department at Home Depot and not know anything about plumbing.” Throughout his tenure he’s gone far above and beyond the basic job description to become the gardener who could keep bettering the garden.

He’s dived deep into the Tea Garden’s history, studying old photos and designs to understand its past and how that should guide its present. He’s visited other Japanese gardens in this country and in Japan. He’s steeped himself in Japanese arts, such as calligraphy, bonsai and tea ceremonies to learn more about the aesthetic principles underlying Japanese gardens.

He’s joined professional organizations like the North American Japanese Garden Association; (he’s now on its board). He’s helped gather public support for the garden, training volunteers and working with nonprofits on efforts from basic maintenance to special projects like the recent $1.1 million renovation of the pagoda. He’s taken classes and workshops and worked closely with renowned Japanese landscape architects on projects in the garden, absorbing through his hands the lessons they have to offer. Then, of course, there’s the tens of thousands of hours he’s devoted to the daily practice of planting, pruning, weeding, clearing, mending and generally tending the space.

All this helped hone his technical skills, of course. But even more, it instilled a deep intuitive understanding of how the garden should look and feel.

Japanese gardens are meant to be contemplative places where people can connect with nature and recharge. They’re compact spaces in which stones and trees, pathways and ponds, sunlight and shade are arranged to convey slivers of the sublimity people might feel on a mountain top or in an old growth forest. The art is in how those elements are arranged. Some compositions do a better job of inviting visitors to slow down, to feel the wind, hear a bird singing, or watch a leaf falling from a tree -- “things that snap you out of whatever you're thinking about and put you in the here and now,” as he says. He calls them “positive distractions.”

So in managing the garden, Pitsenbarger is continually asking himself, does the placement of this stone or the pruning of this tree feel right?

When he started working in the garden, for instance, many of the trees had been pruned into pom pom shapes in the misguided belief it was a Japanese custom. It’s not. While the pom poms were striking, they “didn't create the feeling that I have when I'm walking through a garden in Japan.”

The pom poms were too noisy and made all the trees look the same, obscuring each one’s natural character. He wants people to be able to pause and take in the extraordinariness of a tree; to do as he does often while we are walking and admire a tree’s lines from the base of the trunk through to the tips of the branches. So, he been patiently working to get rid of the pom poms “through a lengthy process of thinning and thinning and thinning some more to get the trees to show their character again.”

But he also kept some of the pom poms because “these mark a place in our own history, the history of this garden.

On the left, some remaining pom poms. On the right, a threadleaf cypress that Pitsenbarger chose for the garden precisely because of the interesting way the trunk curves.

Likewise, he discovered his predecessors hadn’t understood what to do with the Zen Garden, which was installed in 1953 to commemorate the signing in San Francisco of the Treaty of Peace with Japan. It’s his favorite place in the garden because of that spirit of reconciliation and because he feels it has a strong design.

Traditionally, in this kind of dry landscape garden or karesansui, rocks, small trees and bushes, moss and sand or gravel are composed to represent a miniature landscape. The gravel is raked in patterns to represent the movement of water. But, looking at pictures going all the way back to 1953, they all showed just a smooth rectangle of gravel. When he asked one of the retired gardeners why they never raked it in patterns, the man said they didn’t know what to do.

Pitsenbarger wasn’t sure either. He tried copying the pattern of concentric circles he’d seen in karesansui in Japan, but it felt like too busy for the space. Other patterns also looked wrong, until he tried raking in lines that aligned with the needles on a pine tree at the edge of the garden. “When I was done, I was like, that feels right,” he said. I asked what made it right and I have to admit I didn't quite follow his explanation, but here it is: “ We've got active lines, you know, on the outside of the gravel. And so having the straight lines makes that juxtaposition happen in reverse. And so that's, I think, why it works. And it's also simple.”

Across the path from the garden is a grove of cryptomeria, a slender, delicate relative of the California redwood. The ground under the trees used to be a thick layer of duff and old mulch. In the hope of coaxing a bed of moss to grow, Pitsenbarger cleared away the mulch, finding in it debris going back decades, like pop top tabs from soda cans and flash cubes from 1960’s Kodak cameras. Now, there’s a rich green carpet of moss under the trees and the space, as he rightly points out, has the hushed cathedral-like feel of an old growth redwood forest. Though tidier, he noted.

That may be why it felt to me like the most serene spot in the entire garden. I paused to admire the lush moss and watched a squirrel scamper across it in search of nuts. For a moment I was caught in one of those “positive distractions” the garden is meant to provide.

That term, Pitsenbarger had told me, came from Hoichi Kurisu, a famed builder and designer of gardens. Kurisu has been one of Pitsenbarger’s most influential mentors; he’s worked with him on several projects in the Tea Garden, including the stonework and landscaping around the recently renovated pagoda. Kurisu was a boy in Japan when Hiroshima was bombed and that experience led him to a career in building gardens. He wanted to spread beauty and healing in the world. His website declares that mission: “We believe encounters with nature to be essential to mental, physical, and spiritual equilibrium. Our gardens reinforce the quality of humanity which our speed and information obsessed society often elides. Our vision: to create restorative experiences which demonstrate the necessity of natural places to individual and collective wellbeing.”

Pitsenbarger said Kurisu had told him, “if you had to distill the Japanese garden into one word, it would be ‘love.’”

That feeling can be hard to apprehend on days when the garden is thronged with crowds. And with some 500,000 people visiting it each year, that’s many days, including the ones I walked around it with Pitsenbarger.

But not long ago I went back on a rainy day, when there were few other visitors there. I sat in the tea house and savored a cup of hot tea. I watched the raindrops strike circles in the pond, listened to the gushing of the nearby waterfall. The rain made everything brighter, so that even the light green tips of the cypress glowed. So many positive distractions, so many echoes of love.

****

I’ve scarcely scratched Pitsenbarger’s story or the amazing work he’s done. It’s great and if you want to know about him and his thoughts on the Tea Garden, check out this oral history of him done for the Mill Valley Oral History Program. He’s currently working on a book about the Tea Garden.