Hamarikyu Gardens

This guide to Hamarikyu Gardens in Tokyo opens in 1879, when former US president Ulysses S. Grant, broke and restless on a round-the-world voyage, was offered something rarer than a palace tour by Emperor Meiji: a month's lodging inside this walled former shogun's hunting ground. It reaches back two centuries earlier to the tidal pond the Tokugawa family carved from a reed marsh, and the stilted teahouse they raised at its center. Look for the gnarled black pine nearby, its heavy limbs propped on wooden crutches after some three hundred years leaning toward the water.