Shinjuku Gyoen

Shinjuku Gyoen is a 58-hectare garden set right against the towers of Shinjuku, with a perimeter of about three and a half kilometres, and its charm is the sudden drop in noise once you pass the gate. The ground has been a garden for more than two centuries. In 1590 Tokugawa Ieyasu gave the land to the Naitō, a daimyo family, as the site of their Edo residence, and their garden was completed in 1772. After the Meiji Restoration it became an imperial botanical garden in 1879, and in 1906 it was remade as an imperial garden, opening that May in the presence of Emperor Meiji.

The redesign was the work of Henri Martinet, a French landscape architect, and it explains why the park feels like three gardens stitched together. In the north there is a symmetrical French formal garden and an English landscape garden of broad lawns and loose groups of trees; in the south lies a traditional Japanese garden of ponds, islands, bridges and clipped shrubs, with a traditional tea house. The Taiwan Pavilion, built in the southern Chinese Minnan style and given in 1927 by the Japanese community in Taiwan to mark the wedding of the then Crown Prince Hirohito, is among the few structures that survived the air raids of 1945, which burned most of the garden. It opened to the public again in May 1949 as a national garden and is now managed by Japan's Ministry of the Environment.

More than 20,000 trees grow here, and around 1,500 of them are cherries. Because the park mixes early and late varieties, blossom runs from late March well into April, longer than in most of Tokyo, and the English lawn under the trees is one of the city's great hanami grounds. In the first half of November the Japanese garden hosts a chrysanthemum exhibition of carefully trained blooms. A large glasshouse keeps more than 1,700 species of tropical and subtropical plants, a warm refuge on a winter day.

Getting there

The garden sits in Shinjuku, about half a kilometre from the ward centre. Tokyo Haneda International Airport (HND) is about 17 km away. The closest stations are Shinjuku-gyoemmae on the Marunouchi subway line and Sendagaya on the JR Chūō-Sōbu line, each a short walk from a gate.