Just beyond the entrance lies the chaniwa, the tea garden. Stepping stones lead to a washbasin with running water, where visitors are encouraged to wash away the weight of everyday life.
“You just purify yourself,” said Cristiana Bertoldi, cultural director and curator of Yume Japanese Gardens at Tucson Botanical Gardens. “It’s like a transitional space where you forget what’s in the world.”
These are the first steps of a serene trail, down which wanderers are immersed in Japanese heritage, tranquility and contemplation. This meditative space dates back to 2013, when Patricia Derrider founded Yume Japanese Gardens on land that had previously been home to Native Seed/SEARCH.
In May 2025, Tucson Botanical Gardens acquired the space and brought Bertoldi onto its team, and closed the gardens for a year and a half while it underwent renovations. A major project, Bertoldi said, was overhauling the entire irrigation system.
On Sunday, Oct. 11, Yume Japanese Gardens officially reopened to the public. This month, the gardens will begin hosting a slew of events, including workshops, walks and evening concerts, which are held at the picturesque koi pond garden.
The koi pond garden is the second stop, after the chaniwa. Water serves a symbolic purpose in Japanese garden design, according to a summer newsletter from the garden. It represents continuity, flow, impermanence and purification. Vibrant koi fish glide beneath lily pads. A nearby pond house idles; the structure is an original, earl-19th-century farmhouse that Patricia Derrider rescued from destruction during a visit to Japan.
“This is the focal point of the garden. So where we have concerts, we have them on the deck over there.”
In the last year and a half, the team rebuilt the pond, outfitted it with a new filtration system and widened the peninsula, where the garden occasionally performs weddings.
“Lots of hands and willing folks went into this,” said Robin Lansing, gardener and horticulturist.
Among those “willing folks” is Takuhiro Yamada, a fifth-generation Japanese master gardener who visits from Kyoto yearly to give the gardeners guidance — Japanese gardening entails a specific style of pruning called niwaki, in which trees and shrubs are sculpted to look like mature, weathered plants found in nature.
“It’s an art,” Bertoldi said. “So you have to know how to prune it. It’s really not like we do, you know, in the West.”
Leaving the pond, visitors find themselves under the fujidana, a bamboo arbor that, come spring, will flower with vibrant, sweet-scented wisteria blooms. The path then leads to one of two tsuboniwa, or courtyard gardens designed to be viewed outside. The setup — a few plants, a water basin, a lantern — is compact but complete.
“Just a few elements that will give you kind of a microcosm, that will give you the feeling of, you know, everything is here,” Bertoldi said. “Everything I need. The light, the water, the plants, the stones.”
Nearby sits a Zen garden, along with a four-and-a-half tatami mat room that will soon be open to visitors.
A cedar bridge crosses to the dry river, a snaking rock arrangement that gives the illusion of flowing water, complete with “mountains” symbolized by large rocks from the Catalinas. All of it, according to Bertoldi, is steeped in metaphor and exemplifies the Japanese gardening principle of representation.
“You imagine that you have water flowing from the spring, and the waterbed is coming meandering down. So it’s a dry river. So you just have the effect of water, but there’s no water.
So in Japanese culture, a lot is not really what is said, but what, you know, gives you input to imagine things.”
Bertoldi said the local boulder “mountains” also show off another principle, that of naturalness, embracing a region’s topography, climate and landscape. That’s why the garden does not exclusively feature Japanese flora, but rather plants suited to thrive in the Sonoran Desert, such as Texas Rangers and bamboo.
“You have to adapt to the environment where you are,” Bertoldi said. “You don’t impose anything onto the environment.”
After visiting the rooftop garden and bonsai corner, the walk culminates at the gift shop and museum, which showcases Japanese instruments and the works of Tokyo-born botanical and fairy-tale illustrator Manabu C. Saito, who lived in Tucson.
“He became a very good friend of the botanical gardens,” Bertoldi said. “So when he passed away, he left half of his paintings to the botanical gardens.”
