Welcome to Korakuen

Sitting on an island in the very center of Okayama City, Korakuen is nowadays widely regarded as one of the most important gardens of Japan and commonly known by Japanese people as one of the "Three Great Gardens" together with Kenrokuen in Kanazawa and Kairakuen in Mito. Nevertheless, you can hardly say Korakuen is a typical Japanese garden: it was designed about 320 years ago to provide the local feudal lord with a kind of "private countryside" and it was mostly covered in quite uncommon rice paddies and vegetable fields; these areas have been then replaced with lawns, which are even more uncommon in Japanese gardens. Korakuen offers visitors a beautiful, wide landscape to enjoy lovely strolling among its many buildings and groves.


Okayama Korakuen Garden
〒703-8257
1-5 Korakuen, Kita, Okayama
Tel.: (+81) 086-272-1148

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A Lovely Morning at Kayō-no-ike Pond

Korakuen houses three large ponds provided with waterfalls, rock works, lush nature, small buildings and other landscape elements. Kayō-no-ike is the eastern one and the one more sensible to the seasons change due to its flora: the banks of the pond are framed by cherry blossoms, maples and other seasonal trees, while its water surface is occupied during summer by lotus plants known as Ittenshikai and blooming in majestic, white flowers with petals bordered in pink. People from Okayama use to admire them at dawn, for the first Sunday of July the garden opens its gates at daybreak to allow everybody to rejoice in the view of the flowers disclosing their corollas. The meeting becomes the occasion for a social gathering of photographers and ladies in kimono.

Crape Myrtle, the Plant flowering for 100 Days at Yuishinzan Hill

The hill standing in the middle of the garden is artificial: it was built around the early 18th century to follow the new trend of the kaiyūshiki gardens, characterized by serpentine paths and multiple articulated spaces to offer an ever-changing experience to the walker. From the top of the hill, the view is splendid and encompasses almost the entire garden. This is one of the places where, for a long time from mid-July to the end of summer, the crape myrtle flourish in white and hot pink, calling many insects fundamental for pollination. The Japanese name of this plant refers to its long flowering since sarusuberi is literally translated as "red for 100 days".

The Japanese Iris Garden and Its Aristocratic Flowers

This lovely corner has been set up as it appears today in 1884, the same year the Prefecture of Okayama acquired the garden from its former owner, Marquess Ikeda, so it is relatively new compared to the surrounding area, which is separated by a small moat that makes the flowerbed a garden-in-the-garden. Irises are admired by Japanese poets and visual artists for centuries, so it is not uncommon to find them in gardens. What is uncommon about this particular one is that part of its glorious flowers came from the corresponding Japanese Iris Garden sitting in the Meiji Shrine in Shibuya, Tokyo, so these two gardens are somehow like twins.

The meandering stream and its hydrangeas

Although this is not a peculiar characteristic of Korakuen, it is always nice to see some beautiful hydrangeas. The Hydrangea macrophylla species is endemic to Japan and extensively widespread practically everywhere, as its flowers are without a doubt among the most popular ones in the Country because they remind of the rainy seasons, which usually hits Japan between June and July, just when hydrangeas blossom. A trivia: even if hydrangea can blossom in many colors, you can't find "blue hydrangea" or "pink hydrangea" seeds in shops, because all the plants are exactly the same and the blossoming color depends only on the chemical composition of the ground, where an acidic soil will produce blueish flowers and an alkaline soil reddish flowers.

Chinese Fields, Ancient Flowers

The original rice paddies and vegetable fields of Korakuen were replaced with lawns during the late 18th century, but during the following century, a new agricultural area was set next to the Sawa-no-ike Pond and called Seiden Fields. It is a regular square cut in nine sub-squares, in the fashion of the Chinese Zhou dynasty, and two of these sub-squares are the cradles of a real treasure: a kind of lotus dated back to 2000 years ago. Its seeds have been fortuitously unearthed from an archeological excavation conducted in 1951 by professor Ichirō Ōga and hence labeled "Ōga lotus". These sweet, lovely pink flowers now ornate this corner of Okayama, the birthplace of professor Ōga.

Reporter:Mario Pasqualini

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