The Japanese garden at Sonnenberg: the first traditional private Japanesegarden in North America

摘要

After a two-centuries-long seclusion from the Western world, in 1853, during the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan reluctantly opened its ports to foreign trade. However, once it had opened them, Japan decided to promote the wide dissemination of its culturalproducts throughout the West. The gardens in Japan have been one of the most valuable aspects of the culture, so it is no surprise that the gardening culture was one of the most promoted exports. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, world expositions were the most important venues for cultural displays of the greatest world powers. The first Japanese garden at a world fair in the US was exhibited at the Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. The rise in popularityof Japanese gardens coincided with the Gilded Age in America, an age marked by rapid industrial and technological growth, but also a great accumulation of personal wealth. These circumstances led to the beginning of a new trend among the elite that began in the early 1900s: commissioning private Japanese gardens at the estates of wealthy Americans.