Saratoga News

Photograph by Edmund Lee

The long and the short of it is that Hakone's bamboo garden owes a great deal to volunteer Bruce Parkinson.

Bruce and the B Stalks

Hakone's prized grove consists of grass that grows up to 60 feet high

By Sarah Lombardo

With 11 years under its roots, and shoots seemingly reaching into the sky with lush green hands, it's hard to imagine the Bamboo Park at Saratoga's Hakone Gardens is the result of anything less than expertise and experience. Its tranquil setting and calming effect on visitors speak of men and women who have worked for years with bamboo and know its needs from tender grass to proud stalk.

And all that is true.

But the real beginning of Hakone's bamboo park has its roots in much humbler--however enthusiastic and determined--ground. Just ask one of the founders of the Japan Bamboo Society of Saratoga, who says, "The Japan Bamboo Society of Saratoga was created with little understanding of where we were going."

According to Bruce Parkinson, Hakone Foundation's garden committee chairman and bamboo garden specialist, the society was formed in the mid 1980s. Blossoming relations between the society, members of the Sister City delegation and their Japanese friends in the city's sister city of Muko-shi, Japan, planted the seed for a bamboo garden in theory.

When the Hakone Foundation was formed, Parkinson says, the Hakone Garden Master Plan, which included a bamboo park, was created.

One key reason for the creation of the bamboo park was to introduce Americans to the many benefits of bamboo and to its proper cultivation. In Japan, bamboo is an integral part of the culture; in America, bamboo is largely considered an invasive plant that creeps under fences and creates ill will between neighbors.

Bamboo began to arrive from Japan that same year, and with it the challenges.

One of those challenges included simply keeping the bamboo alive. When the shoots arrived from Japan, they had to be inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Plant Quarantine officials at the San Francisco airport, Parkinson said. From there, they were transferred to another quarantine facility in Saratoga. The plants stayed indoors for 24 months, Parkinson said. It was enough to put a strain on any plant.

"They've been growing in soil and then you take them out of the soil, and that's a hell of a shock for a plant," he said. "Other problems were simply logistics."

Such as how to lay out the bamboo garden.

According to Parkinson, who holds a master's degree in plant pathology from UC-Davis, the original drawings for the park's formal garden came shortly after the bamboo began to arrive from Japan. Called Kizuna-en, which translates to "friendship" or "hands across the ocean," the garden would be teeming with symbolism: A white gravel area in the garden's lower terrace would symbolize the Pacific Ocean; five large stones on the right side would would represent the five members of the Saratoga City Council; and 26 stones on the left would be the councilmembers of the sister city of Muko-shi.

But, Parkinson says, the land was not to cooperate. So the garden was essentially flipped over from the original drawings and put in backward, putting the five Saratoga councilmember stones on the left side of the garden and the 26 Muko-shi councilmember stones on the right.

The actual construction of the garden in 1987 encountered "some of the usual problems in construction when you're dealing with rank amateurs--and we were rank amateurs," Parkinson says with a laugh. "We had problems getting equipment and so on."

Parkinson says the group didn't have the right equipment--or enough money--to do site clearing and grading. Assistance from the California Conservation Corps did help get that accomplished.

In late 1987, about a dozen men, including architects Kiyosi Yasui and his nephew, Hiroshi Yasui, from the Muko-shi/Kyoto architectural firm Yasuimoku Komuten Company Ltd., arrived to begin the garden.

"They just kind of announced one day that they were coming over and that they were going to do it," Jack Tomlinson, Hakone's head gardener, says.

The garden's stones were moved into place using city-owned skip-loaders, a process Parkinson describes as "dangerous and clumsy but it worked."

Also among the Japanese delegation was Yoshiji Hirata, chief of the General Affairs Section of the Japan Society of Bamboo Development and Protection.

Such delegates were not, in Parkinson's words, "rank amateurs." And their help and organization is obvious.

Working with them "really was an incredible experience," Parkinson says.

Although moving the larger stones was taken care of, Parkinson says picking out the garden's smaller stones was also difficult.

Parkinson says the Japanese gardeners called for all-white stones to be used in the garden. But with the California sunshine hitting the stones, Parkinson reasoned, visitors would be blinded with one look at the garden. Parkinson suggested a darker gravel, immediately rejected for being too dark.

"So we compromised 50-50," Parkinson says. Today, the garden contains mostly white gravel with just enough black stones to take off the glare.

Parkinson says that over time, the droppings from the bamboo and basic wear will take the sheen off the white rocks enough to make them not so blinding in the sun, and when that happens, Parkinson told the Japanese, "We can have ladies come in and take out all the black stones in 50 or 100 years. Boy, they thought that was really funny."

Then came the planting.

"The planting was OK," Parkinson says. "But we ended up with a lot of plants left over. So what do you do?"

What he and Tomlinson did was plant the extra bamboo on the hillsides all around the garden.

The park was completed in October 1987. The park was formally dedicated with a Buddhist ceremony in November of that year. And then, Parkinson says, the real work began.

Bamboo, like any young plant, needs plenty of water. And with Hakone's then one faucet located in the area--and with what Parkinson refers to as laughable water pressure and volume--the daily watering that the bamboo needed throughout the following summer was not an easy task.

In an account of that time, Parkinson writes, "A year later, a small booster pump doubled the volume to poor from almost impossible. Then came some additional faucets, thanks again to the CCC. But only one hose or sprinkler could be used at a time."

And the labor, everyone agrees, was mostly Parkinson's, who is the first to say he knew little if anything about the sturdy grass when he started.

In those years of nothing but hand watering, Parkinson, now 65, worked in the bamboo park close to full time. He says that when he first started putting in long hours in the garden, it was, in large part, because "it was a way of thanking Mr. [Kiyoshi] Yasui for the time and effort." These days he puts in six to eight hours on weekends. "The job has changed a bit from growing it to maintaining it, but to begin with, it was a constant battle day after day after day."

Anyone observing the bamboo garden is struck by how delicate the plant looks. But its gentle appearance belies its strength. There's a good reason bamboo is frequently the subject or art and poetry, praised for its strength as it bends in the wind and bounces back each spring after bending from the burden of heavy loads of snow in the winter.

Bamboo is actually a giant grass which has been grown in China since at least 1,000 years B.C.E. It was introduced in Japan 1,000 years ago.

Because of its strength, bamboo is used in China for scaffolding and is thought by many to be stronger and better able to withstand typhoons than steel. Many bridges in China are constructed from bamboo.

In India, it is used in place of steel as concrete reinforcement and in the building of boat hulls. Much of the paper in India comes from bamboo.

The Bamboo Society of Japan was founded by Koichiro Uedo to protect Japan's bamboo groves from encroachment by that country's rapidly expanding population.

In an interview when the bamboo park was still in the planning stages, Tomlinson noted that Uedo dedicated his life to studying the commercial uses of bamboo, in large part because bamboo grows so fast. The Japan Bamboo Society encourages the study of the use of bamboo for paper. While an acre of bamboo yields less than an acre of wood, bamboo grows much faster, requiring only a few years growth as opposed to about 20 for pine trees.

Looking around the bamboo park today, Tomlinson points to Parkinson and says, "This really is all his work."

"His enthusiasm infected us all. Despite very little money and no community support, we decided to go with it."

Although Parkinson admits that he has put quite a bit of sweat into the garden, he downplays his role. A self-described loner, Parkinson never married. He grew up in rural Piedmont, and says there wasn't much family togetherness. "To a certain extent, the isolation created a gap in my life that the bamboo park has filled to some extent."

The two-acre bamboo park now consists of 18 varieties of bamboo, including vivax, or Taiwan madake, which is very similar to Mo-chiku, Chinese giant timber bamboo; Madake, Japanese timber bamboo; golden bamboo; black-stemmed bamboo; striped sasa; and palmetta, a large-leafed bamboo and the rare tortoise shell bamboo. The little seedlings of the garden's beginnings are now tall bamboo forests, some plants reaching 60 feet in height.

An irrigation system was eventually installed at the park, but Parkinson still hand-waters many of the plants once a week.

Like any grass, Parkinson says, the bamboo flowers at the end if its life cycle--which for bamboo is about every 20 to 120 years. Visitors to the park can sometimes be lucky enough to spy a flower on a bamboo, if they know what they are looking for.

The bamboo park is closed to casual visitors from March through June. Parkinson says the bamboo is very fragile at that time, and that new shoots put out by the plants are often inviting to vandals.

"I cannot tolerate this," Parkinson writes, "not after all the time and effort expended as a volunteer."

The origins of the garden may have been rooted in enthusiasm with little money, and the building of the garden may have been an eye-opening learning experience, but the bamboo park's health and success is no surprise to Tomlinson.

"It's always been that way with Hakone," he says with a serene grin. "It's always been the tail wagging the dog. We didn't get any public support, and we are always seeking answers to our financial questions. But it's forced us to be more creative."

With the completion of the Cultural Exchange Center years ago, and a tea flower garden, bamboo research center and Shinto shrine all in the plans for Hakone's future, Tomlinson has a simple theory for the garden: "Trust in Providence," he says. "You just have to think right. If you think big and work hard, then things happen."

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