Densho Digital Archive - Junkoh Harui Interview (denshovh-hjunkoh-01-0024)

<Begin Segment 24>

DH: Describe Bainbridge Gardens today for someone who hadn't visited.

JH: Well, Bainbridge Gardens -- our goal is to make Bainbridge Gardens a destination-type nursery. We want you to come here and want to totally explore the property with the theme gardens, with the wonderful statuary, the hundreds of varieties of plants and perennials and annuals, for a wonderful restaurant espresso bar, children's playground, memorial garden. We want you to come here and not stay for a minute or two, we want you to linger and enjoy the amenities of the garden. That's what we would like all our guests to do here. And we don't want you to come in and spend a lot of money, that's not point. The point is to enjoy a wonderful history and a wonderful legacy and smell the wonderful fresh air that's been created by these beautiful trees that my family planted here some sixty, seventy, eighty years ago. That's what's so wonderful about this property.

DH: So if people can still come here to shop as they would in any other nursery --

JH: That's right.

DH: -- some people come, I think, entirely for the history.

JH: That's right.

DH: Describe the Memorial Garden.

JH: Well, the Memorial Garden was actually an area where we sold plants out of, but during the war when we left for four plus years, the trees grew into large specimen trees during that short period of time. And the reason we picked that site is because of several significant trees, one being the sculptured pear tree that my father grafted from a very young group of trees in the shape of a pear. And then there's the age old wisteria plant that I remember during my childhood. There was a row of wisterias there, and that was one of the remaining ones. It's a beautiful white wisteria that blooms in March, or excuse me, May. And so we built a Memorial Garden in honor of my mother and dad.

DH: You also named the buildings for your parents?

JH: Yes, I did. We had the Zen Building named after Zenhichi and the Shiki Building named after my mom.

DH: Tell us the story of the lions.

JH: The lions. There are two cast iron lions that are in the Memorial Garden, and during the war they had been pilfered and were missing from the garden. And for some unexplained reason about five years ago -- I guess it more six years ago now -- one of the lions appeared. And we made light of that in the local newspaper and low and behold the next day the second lion appeared at our door, and now they are back home in the Memorial Garden.