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Written by Debra Brehmer, Contributing writer
Sep 8, 2010
Anderson Japanese Gardens is at 318 Spring Creek Road, in Rockford, Ill. (www.Anderson Gardens.org.) While in Rockford, check out the Rockford Art Museum, currently featuring work by Chicago artists Richard Hull and Nicholas Sistler. – Photo: Courtesy
As our society eliminates unscheduled time, the concept of day dreaming feels ever more remote. The Japanese (via the Chinese historically) understood that to create a sense of reverie one needed to carefully structure the passage. It was only through artificial ordering and attentive effort that one could lay the means for relaxation.
The Anderson Japanese Gardens in Rockford, Ill., are built on this kind of paradox – and perhaps that is why their beauty is so pronounced. Rockford is a ravished city that struggles for an economic foothold. Yet hidden within its folds is this 12-acre gem of reflecting pools, golden koi, stone paths, shady knolls, a 50-foot waterfall and trickling streams. It was recently rated the number one Japanese garden in America.
About 90 miles from Milwaukee, one approaches Rockford through long stretches of big-box sprawl to a depleted downtown of once noble 19th-century buildings. A busy street borders the garden entrance, but once you step inside a mythical land beckons. You immediately forget the white noise of traffic as your hearing adjusts to the focused tick of a bamboo funnel collecting and pouring water in a hidden grove. The soul thrives on simplicity, and here a single leaf floating down a shallow stream offers everything you need.
John D. Anderson was the son of a prominent Rockford family who ran Anderson Packaging. He graduated from the UW-Madison in 1966, married, had four children and purchased a home on a hill on Stoneridge Road with an acre lot. He had visited Japan with a college buddy in the 1960s but it wasn’t until a trip to a Japanese garden in Portland, Ore., in 1978 that his “aha” moment occurred.
Anderson returned to the Midwest and called landscape architect Hoichi Kurisu, who had designed the Portland garden. Together they initiated a project that would shape the next 30 years of their lives. They sculpted acre after acre of swampy Midwestern scrub into an other-worldly pastoral dream featuring three styles of Japanese gardens: a 12th-century pond strolling garden, 16th-century tea garden and a contemporary garden of reflection.
The gardens could be considered one large composition that entices and rewards slow, engaged looking – a little like a Kandinsky painting, but not as messy. The formal elements here are air, stones, water and plants. Spun together within a 1,000-year tradition, the principles of animism and Buddhism provide gentle philosophical depth to the notion of a stroll.
Your eyes need time to adjust to this new language. Then, slowly, nuances appear. Layers and textures of leaves, innumerable shades of green, the feeling of a curve and the color of a shadow begin to assert themselves as if they were always there, but we hadn’t noticed. It’s a perfect lesson in observation: What we think we see is only a fragment of what could be seen.
As the 1.5-mile half path zigzags and crosses small bridges, new scenes (like the sight of a tea house built into the hillside or a lone duck perched on a rock) nudge our consciousness toward the ethereal. Sunlight falls into shadowy places in a rhythm that feels programmed to make us notice. Simple log benches provide moments to rest and contemplate the view. The ponds and streams first dazzle us with sparkling surfaces but soon fish or turtles emerge, and then reflections begin to appear. The more you look, the more you see.
Be sure to buy the Koi food at the ticket counter, because a sprinkling of these pellets causes eruptions of fat, orange, yellow, gold and black fish that dissipate back to their leisurely drift as quickly as they arrive.
Although Anderson gave the site to the public 13 years ago and had his home on the hill demolished a year and a half ago, renovations and expansion continues. Anderson plans to build a new, more architecturally appropriate, home on the hill in the near future. A restaurant opened in the visitor’s center in 2008, featuring a chef from Thailand via Laos with an Asian fusion menu of her family recipes.
Prime fall viewing at the garden is the first or second week of October. You can call the center to ask the percentage of color change. Legend has it that there is a Japanese maple tree by the garden of reflection that turns so red that people think it’s artificial. As the Zen koan suggests: Reality is elusive. Impermanence is the only truth.
