Brooklyn Botanic Garden

This guide to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York City follows Takeo Shiota, a self-taught Japanese landscape designer who arrived in New York in 1907 and was hired in 1914 to build a Japanese garden on land once used as a city ash dump. It traces how he shaped the hills and pond you can see, planted maples and cherries along the shore, and created the first Japanese garden inside any American public botanic garden. The guide then turns to 1938, when rising anti-Japanese hostility before the war reached the garden itself. Look for the lanterns and the lakeside shrine as you walk the pond's edge.