<Begin Segment 10>

JA: Tell me how, what you remember about the, the flower gardens and the parks that started up there.

HF: A number, a number... see, these barracks had a space in between, barracks, they were, I'm guessing, but I'm saying there must have been about 30 feet between, between barracks, and some of the ambitious people would get together with the residents within, within their block, between the two blocks, because you were facing each other -- the entrance was facing each other. So, they would make a garden between the, between the, between the two barracks. And then, and then there were gardeners that knew how to make the real Japanese gardens, they made the real Japanese gardens out in the open. And those gardens, the remains of some of those gardens are still there. I don't know exactly where they are, but...

JA: They're uncovering some of them now.

HF: I think, I think they're all marked where they are.

JA: So, that must've changed the feeling of the place over time.

HF: Oh, yes, it made it, it made the appearance more, more appealing and more comfortable. And it wasn't just, everything was just barren because there were no trees there at all because, with the exception of an apple tree and there, they bulldozed everything. They bulldozed the whole area so that they got rid of all the scrub -- everything that was scrub, grass and whatever, and leveled the ground to build the, to put the barracks up. So, you know, it was very barren, and that was another thing that was bad about it, was it was so barren that -- and it was, the ground was very sandy there. And the Manzanar area was a very windy area and the wind would come up all of a sudden -- for no reason at all, the wind would come and, and it would be so bad that you could hardly walk outside, and then when it did blow like that, in the beginning, the sand would come up through the cracks in the floor and would come in through the sills of the window, and it was terrible. So, that would happen every now and then.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2002 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.