Watching the recent Olympics in Tokyo reminded me that when Kathy and I lived in Portland, OR, we often visited the Portland Japanese Garden. The garden covers twelve acres in Portland’s Washington Park and includes eight separate garden styles, an authentic Japanese Tea House, meandering streams, tree-covered walkways, and a great view of the city’s ever-present Mt. Hood.
According to information in the Japanese Garden website, when His Excellency Nobuo Matsunaga, the former Ambassador of Japan to the United States, visited the Portland Japanese Garden, he proclaimed it to be “the most beautiful and authentic Japanese garden in the world outside of Japan.” Though I can’t personally vouch for that, I don’t find it at all hard to believe.
(Click on any photo below to enlarge, then use arrows to scroll through the images.)
We had a membership in the Japanese Garden for one year and tried to go once a month. Therefore, you will see changes in the appearance of the gardens from bare trees to lush colorful vegetation. The images are mostly devoid of people because we usually went on my flex day off. The gardens are very popular and often draw quite a few people.
If you’re ever in Portland, Oregon, and are looking for something to do, the Portland Japanese Garden is a beautiful place to visit.
The Tokyo Olympics ended four weeks ago. So, why did it take me so long to post these photos? The original photos were taken about eighteen years ago, before I entered the digital age. They were on Kodachrome slides packed away in metal boxes that each hold 750 slides. I had to first look in my old hand-written photo log books to find out which rolls of film include images from the Japanese Gardens, then check on which rolls were stored in each metal box, and then dig through those boxes to find the relevant slides. After finding groups of slides, I looked through each of them by holding them up to the window in my office. When the total was reduced to a manageable number, I scanned them twelve at a time with an Epson Perfection V700 Photo Scanner. Then I imported the files into Adobe Lightroom and used Lightroom and Photoshop to carry out the final cleanups and crops. Then all I had to do was upload them to my website, create some galleries, and type a little explanatory text. Voila!