Kawachi Wisteria Garden
Interesting facts
- The garden's story starts with a vine from a valley flooded for the Kawachi Reservoir, transplanted here as the 'first tree' and now over 120 years old.
- Higuchi Masao began clearing a wooded hillside for the garden with his eldest son in 1968, nearly a decade before it opened.
- Some 22 varieties of wisteria grow in the garden, from long-raceme Noda forms to pink, red, white and double-flowered kinds.
- The great trellis of long-raceme Noda wisteria alone covers more than 3,000 square metres.
- In 2015 CNN included the garden in its list of the 31 most beautiful places in Japan.
- The garden has been tended by the Higuchi family for more than half a century, and 18 of its autumn maples are 70 to 80 years old.
Why it is worth it
For a few weeks each spring, Kawachi Wisteria Garden turns into tunnels of hanging flowers: long trellised passages where clusters of wisteria droop overhead in graded shades of white, pink, lilac and deep violet, so dense that the light inside takes on their colour. The two tunnels, about 80 and 110 metres long, are the garden's signature, joined by a wisteria dome and a great open trellis whose oldest vines are more than a century old.
The garden is private and was opened in April 1977 by Higuchi Masao in the hills of Yahatahigashi ward, on the southern side of Kitakyushu. It covers roughly 10,000 square metres, and the area under blossom alone runs to about 6,000. Around twenty varieties are grown, from the long-tendrilled Noda wisteria to double-flowered and white forms, with azaleas planted among them. The garden also opens for a short season in late autumn, when some 700 maple trees around it, a number of them 70 to 80 years old, turn red.
For decades the owners avoided advertising and declined press coverage, worried that crowds would damage the plants, and the place was known mostly by word of mouth. That changed in 2012, when photographs of the tunnels circulated on foreign websites listing the world's most beautiful real places and spread across social media; the garden has since been associated with fans of the manga and anime "Demon Slayer" as well. Kitakyushu itself was formed in 1963 by merging five cities at the northern tip of Kyushu, among them Yahata, whose steelworks, opened in 1901, made it the cradle of Japanese heavy industry; several of its historic industrial sites are part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing.
Getting there
The garden lies about 6 km from central Kitakyushu by straight line, in the hills of Yahatahigashi ward. By road it is roughly 8.5 km from the Otani interchange of Kitakyushu Expressway Route 4, via Prefectural Route 62. The nearest railway stations are on the JR Kagoshima Main Line in Yahata. The nearest airport is Kitakyushu Airport (KKJ), about 23 km away; Fukuoka Airport is the larger gateway to the region.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Kawachi Wisteria Garden is a private garden located in Kitakyushu founded by Higuchi Masao. The garden contains over 20 kinds of wisterias in a 10,000m2 area. CNN listed the garden among Japan's 31 most beautiful places, and this greatly increased its visitors; access is now limited to timed, advance-purchase tickets.
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