Saratoga News

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Bay Area Gardens Network members admire a bamboo grove in Hakone Gardens.

Gardening network meets at Hakone

Experts offered tips on how to run better gardens

By Shari Kaplan

Something old and something new came together in Saratoga Feb. 13, when Hakone Gardens hosted the third symposium of the Bay Area Gardens Network.

BAGN is less than two years old, according to Hakone's garden specialist, Jack Tomlinson, and was the brainchild of Californian Richard Turner, who also serves as the editor of Pacific Horticulture magazine.

Hakone Gardens, on the other hand, had its beginnings in 1918 as a weekend retreat created by Isabel Stine for family, friends and entertaining. Its name comes from Fuji-Hakone National Park, a mountain hot springs resort on the Japanese island of Honshu.

After several changes of hands, Hakone became a Saratoga city park in 1966 and then an independent entity in the summer of 1997, when city funding ended and the Hakone Foundation stepped in.

In creating BAGN, Turner saw a need for Bay Area gardens of all sizes and types to keep in touch with each other and stay abreast of various issues of interest among garden circles, Tomlinson explains.

The group meets once every six months, with a modest but growing membership. Initially, BAGN convened at UC-Berkeley's botanical gardens. The second time, the venue was Strybing Arboretum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. This month's Saratoga symposium centered around publicity and marketing for gardens; it also included a tour of Hakone and a Japanese luncheon.

"It's a good networking thing. It's trying to promote and improve the gardens in the Bay Area," Tomlinson says of BAGN. "It was an honor for us at Hakone to host the other gardens and also learn something."

The meeting offered tips, techniques and resources on how to run a better garden and gave Tomlinson a chance to discuss his work at Hakone and gain some feedback.

In the works for the future, he says, is the development of a better entrance garden, which will also be used as a place to show and cultivate the flowers used in Hakone's traditional Japanese tea ceremonies.

Tomlinson also hopes to gain an apprentice or two who are studying the art of Japanese gardening. Such assistance would help him--currently he is Hakone's only gardener--and it would be beneficial to a student who needs to gain practical experience in the field. BAGN may be able to help him in both of his goals.

In addition to offering 15 1/2 landscaped acres for walks, picnics and weddings, Hakone Gardens also has a busy schedule of arts classes and cultural events, including classes on painting, Japanese doll-making, gardening and haiku. The first Thursday of every month is dedicated to demonstrations--complete with tea and sweets--of the traditional Japanese tea ceremony, held in Hakone's Cultural Exchange Center.

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