©Shinjuku Gyoen National Park
Shinjuku gyoen national garden
First notice about the place where now stands Shinjuku Gyoen or Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden dates back to 1590. Formerly a private mansion, owned by a feudal lord, Shinjuku Gyoen was then completed in 1906 as an imperial garden. After Second World War the garden was re-designated as a national park.
The gardens stretches on a 58.3 hectares area: here the visitors can admire three distinct styles – Formal Garden, Landscape Garden, and Japanese Traditional Garden –but the gardens is well known for its modern western-style of the Meiji era.
Hayato Fukuba, chairman of Shinjuku Imperial Garden in 1898, went to France and Germany to study flowering and fruit horticulture in his young ages and was well informed to most Western horticulture. We owe him the remodeling of the garden as a landscape garden, in 1902 – 1906, work that he assigned to Henri Martine, professor at Versailles horticultural school.
Although the war bombing of 1945 partly destroyed the original design, in 1949 it was again opened to the public as “Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden”.
The Garden boasts different natural attractions along the year: cherry blossoms in spring, soft greens of summer, chrysanthemums and colorful leaves of autumn and snowscapes in winter.
Shinjuku Gyoen National Park
11 Naito-machi, Shinjuku-ku