Added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 15, 2005

Los Angeles is blessed with a bounty of Japanese gardens. It’s easy to get swept away by the tranquility of a well-tended one, like Pasadena’s Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden. There’s simple pleasure to be taken in matching our rhythms to the swaying of the trees, or a golden koi swimming through a pond. But if you’re inclined to seek it out, you can also find a complex narrative embedded in the landscape at Storrier Stearns: the stories of its maker, its benefactors and stewards, and the confluence of forces that brought a 1500-year-old tradition to a private estate in Pasadena in the late 1930s.

To tell the full story of Storrier Stearns, we need to go back 50 years before it was created. LA owes its legion of Japanese gardens to the waves of immigrants that came from Japan in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They started moving to California after the federal Chinese Exclusion Act barred new immigration from China. That created a big void in California, which had relied heavily on Chinese labor to build the railroad system, work the gold fields of the Sierra Nevadas, and transform central California into fertile agricultural land.

While the Japanese were permitted to enter the country in the late 19th century, first-generation immigrants (known as issei) still faced unthinkable discrimination. For decades, they weren’t allowed to become US citizens or own land, and they were prevented from living in large swaths of the city. Many Japanese ended up working in the agricultural fields of Torrance and the South Bay. A large Japanese fishing village also coalesced on Terminal Island at the Port of LA, where the canned tuna industry thrived thanks to the expertise of hundreds of issei fisherman.

At the same time, California was in the midst of a love affair with the art, architecture and design of these new immigrants. It had only been a few decades since Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s “gunboat diplomacy” opened up Japanese ports to western trade. By the late 19th century, Japan was regularly participating at international expositions. Both Frank Lloyd Wright and the great Pasadena architects Greene & Greene encountered Japanese architecture early on at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, in Chicago. And these massive fairs also helped introduce the traditional Japanese garden to a much wider audience. Many Californians got their first taste at the Japanese Tea Garden exhibit at the California Mid-Winter International Exposition of 1894, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park (an expanded version of the garden is still there), or the Japanese Teahouse at the Panama-California Exposition of 1915, in San Diego’s Balboa Park.

In Los Angeles, many of our most prominent Japanese gardens from the early 20th century were public attractions. From about 1914-1922, you could ascend a Hollywood hill and stroll the gardens of antique dealers Adolph and Eugene Bernheimer, which later turned into the restaurant Yamashiro. Out in San Marino, Henry Huntington purchased the plants and features from a failed commercial Japanese garden owned by George Turner Marsh, the same man who created the garden in Golden Gate Park. The Huntington Gardens opened to the public in 1928, the year after Henry E. Huntington died. 

Storrier Stearns is an example of another part of this phenomenon: the private garden, originally intended for the enjoyment of a single family. It’s one of the very few private gardens from before WWII that’s left in California.

Charles and Ellamae Storrier Stearns were a wealthy, well-traveled older couple who settled in Pasadena after getting married in 1931. It was Charles’s second marriage, Ellamae’s third. They had separately spent much of the previous decades traveling the world, and both held dual citizenships in the US and France. Ellamae had lived in Hawaii with her first husband, Bryn Mawr, PA with her second, and also spent time in Europe and the far east. Charles had lived in France since 1917, with homes in Nice and Paris, and was an active participant in the civic and cultural spheres there. 

In Pasadena, the Storrier Stearns lived in a grand, three-story Georgian-style mansion built in 1913. Their generous estate encompassed a full seven lots along Arlington Drive, just east of Orange Grove Boulevard. The grounds were surrounded by gardens, and there were carriage barns, quarters for a chauffeur and a small gardener’s home, too. 

The Storrier Stearns were worldly folk, and prolific collectors of art. A 1931 article in the Pasadena Post reported that Charles was inducted into the Order of the Legion of Honor for donating art to various French museums. Ellamae’s obituary explains that she was involved with the Pasadena Art Institute (forerunner to the Norton Simon Museum), and occasionally exhibited her collection there. They had a particular interest in the art of China and Japan, likely cultivated by the trips they made to the far east during the 1930s. And by 1935 they had decided to replace their two tennis courts with a Japanese garden of their own. 

That year, the Storrier Stearns were introduced to Kinzuchi Fujii by an Asian art dealer from Santa Barbara named Nathan Bentz (read more about the Bentzes here). Fujii was an experienced landscape designer and carpenter who emigrated to the US from Japan in 1903, worked a variety of odd jobs around the country, and ended up back in California in the early 1920s. He worked on the Japanese garden at the Gurdon Wattles estate in Hollywood, and also created small gardens in Ojai and Santa Barbara – I’m guessing that’s how Nathan Bentz heard of him. The Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden would be Fujii’s largest and most enduring commission.

Fujii spent a year planning the 1.45-acre garden, and the next four constructing it. He created for the Storrier Stearns a chisen kaiyu-shiki or “strolling pond garden,” with two ponds, four bridges, a wooden waystation and a network of paths that wound their way around the entire property. On the south side of the garden he piled up a 25-foot hill from the soil dug out of the ponds, with a concrete buttress supporting it from behind. A waterfall tumbles gently down the hillside, providing the one consistent sound you can hear in the background while you’re there. A short garden wall topped with black leaded tiles lines the perimeter on Arlington Drive. All the work was accomplished without the benefit of any heavy equipment – just manpower and mulepower.

From Japan, Fujii imported carved granite statues and lanterns of stone or bronze. He also designed a large niko-an (“two-pond retreat”) teahouse for the west side of the garden, and had it built in Japan, disassembled, shipped overseas and re-assembled on site. According to the garden’s NRHP nomination form, the City of Pasadena required a concrete foundation instead of the traditional hewn rocks, and mandated stucco walls on the exterior. 

All the manmade wonders of the Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden are gracious display cases for its inspired natural landscaping. Fujii chose a range of flora that you might find in the woods in Japan, including Japanese maple, Chinese elm, black pine, ferns, rhododendrons and camellias. They complement a variety of native California species like sycamores, oaks and redwoods. Most of the original trees remain from the original plantings from 1939-1940.

Stroll down the path between the ponds, and you’ll spy some fauna as well. Red-eared sliders and well-fed koi paddle through the lily pads, in search of grub or a patch of sun. 

While you can certainly appreciate Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden as a tranquil place to chill out and appreciate the beauty of nature, there’s much more at work here. Traditional Japanese gardens incorporate tons of elements connected to Japanese philosophy and religion stretching back 1500 years. And Storrier Stearns is no different. 

Water, rocks and plants, common to all Japanese gardens, combine to represent a sort of utopian version of Japan’s natural setting. The ponds and waterfalls here evoke the ocean and mountain streams; even in the karesansui or dry/Zen gardens, gravel is raked into patterns meant to mimic the flow of water. Stones and sand might represent the seashore, while specific trees and plants are often chosen for their religious symbolism. The Storrier Stearns NRHP form suggests that evergreen trees like pines often appear in Japanese gardens as symbols of longevity. 

Islands are symbolic of sacred spaces, outside the reach of humans. They’re often built in Japanese gardens in the middle of ponds, with no bridges connecting them to the footpaths. At Storrier Stearns there are a number of large rocks dotting the middle of the large ponds. Bridges hold special meaning in Japanese gardens, too. According to Alex Pizzoni of Botanic Gardens Conservation International, bridges may “symbolize the path to paradise and immortality.” One of the four bridges at Storrier Stearns is a long “devil’s bridge” made of two granite slabs, offset into a zig-zag pattern. I’ve seen these in a number of Asian gardens, including the small one in the courtyard of the USC Pacific Asia Museum; the idea is to confuse any evil spirits that might be lurking. 

When Zen Buddhism was introduced to Japan in the late 12th century, it began to inform the aesthetics of Japanese gardens. You can see principles of asymmetry, tranquility, austerity and quiet at work here. And naturalness: nearly all the manmade parts of this garden were made of wood or stone. 

Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden was completed at a time of fraying relations between the Japanese and American governments. Public opinion in America was already swaying against Japan, after a number of war atrocities came to light during the Sino-Japanese War that broke out in 1937. 

Then everything changed when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in late 1941, and America plunged into WWII. President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942, authorizing the removal of Japanese-Americans to internment camps. Kinzuchi Fujii was one of some 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry that had to leave their lives behind. It’s said that Fujii brought all of his photographs of Storrier Stearns in a suitcase when he left for the internment camp. According to the Storrier Stearns website, Fujii never visited the garden again before his death in 1957. A comment on this blog post indicates that he moved to San Diego, and was so dejected by his treatment during WWII that he couldn’t bear to return to his greatest work. 

Charles Storrier Stearns passed away in 1944, and Ellamae died in 1949. They had no children and no heirs, though Ellamae did leave substantial sums to Pasadena organizations in her will, including $50,000 to the Pasadena Art Institute.

In 1950 the entire Storrier Stearns estate went up for auction. A local art and antiquities dealer named Gamelia Haddad Poulsen attended the auction with the intention of buying a pair of Louis XV chairs, and ended up with the winning bid for the entire estate. 

When the City of Pasadena denied Poulsen’s request to move her art gallery into the old three-story mansion, she started selling off the property, keeping only the Japanese garden and enough space around it to build a house for her family. Built in 1956, the house is the largest structure you see in the gardens. The mansion, meanwhile, was dismantled and eventually demolished. One room of the mansion was apparently preserved as part of the Pacific Asia Museum.

Things got wild in 1974 when CalTrans seized a 60-foot chunk of the property through eminent domain, with the intention of extending the 710 freeway north to the 210. Those plans were stalled for decades due to public opposition, and 50 years later, CalTrans formally dropped the project. But the uncertainty was enough to keep Poulsen from maintaining the garden as she might have, were it not threatened to be sliced through by a freeway. 

By the time Poulsen died in 1985, the garden had suffered years of neglect. The pond had dried up, and plants were dead or dying. Fujii’s original teahouse had burned down in 1981 (nobody’s quite sure why). Some of the garden’s original features had been sold, including the entrance gate, which now ushers visitors into the Japanese Friendship Garden at Balboa Park in San Diego. The foo dogs that once flanked the entrance now grace the Huntington’s Japanese garden. 

Around 1990, Gamelia Haddad Poulsen’s son Jim Haddad and his wife Connie committed to restoring the Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden. There were real estate agents sniffing around, offering to buy the lots from the Haddads. But Jim and Connie had too many memories of the place to let it go. They had stayed in the guesthouse after they got married, seen their daughter get married there, watched their dogs and grandchildren romp around the pathways. And they knew that the garden was historically significant, too.

Instead of selling Storrier Stearns, the Haddads opted to restore it. In 2005 they hired Takeo Uesugi, a landscape designer and professor renowned for his work at the Huntington, the James Irvine Garden in Little Tokyo and The George and Sakaye Aratani Japanese Garden at Cal Poly Pomona. Uesugi brought on board a Colombian horticulturalist named Jesus Rodriguez to restore the plantlife. They had new rocks brought in to line the paths. They repaired bridges, and commissioned a replica of the original entrance. They fixed leaks in the pond and rebuilt a termite-ridden waystation. Jim Haddad built a new waystation himself, using a spruce tree he found in Lake Arrowhead; he also supervised construction of the new teahouse, using Fujii’s original plans as a guide. 

Visit today, and you’d never know that this natural oasis, tucked away in the middle of suburban Pasadena, was ever anything but lush and green and perfectly manicured. You can amble through for a couple hours on a weekend, contemplating the layered history of this place, the 1500 years of tradition and societal change that made it possible. Or you can just sit and take in the overwhelming beauty of one of the most serene spots in all of Los Angeles.

Thanks to the staff at Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden for letting me use their historic photos, and Becky Ward for playing middleperson so capably.

Storrier Stearns is open to the public most Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Visit japanesegardenpasadena.com for more information.

Sources & Recommended Reading/Watching

+ Blon, John L. Von: “In Terms of Beauty: LANDSCAPE SERVICE PAYS RENT ON LAND” (Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1933 – via ProQuest)

+ Botanic Gardens Conservation International: “An insight into Japanese gardens in Japan” (BGCI.org, December 16, 2024)

+ Brightwell, Eric: “Southland Parks — A Directory of Asian Gardens in Los Angeles” (Eric Brightwell: Exploration, Adventures, and Maps blog, May 20, 2016)

+ Eastman, Alvan Clark: “Institute Given Rare Buddha” (Pasadena Star-News, January 15, 1949 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Erdman, Ann: “Mystery Hstory — Solved!” (Ann Erdman blog, January 23, 2014)

+ Grimes, Teresa: Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden’s NRHP nomination form 

+ Hamilton, Matt: “Takeo Uesugi dies at 75; landscape architect restored Huntington Library’s Japanese Garden” (Los Angeles Times, February 17, 2016)

+ Hemmerlein, Sandi: “Photo Essay: The Japanese Garden That Almost Became a Freeway“ (Avoiding Regret, February 19, 2016) 

+ Hobart, Christy: “Japanese ideals, transplanted” (Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2013 – via ProQuest)

+ Hobart, Christy: “Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden: Serene reawakening in Pasadena” (Los Angeles Times, April 5, 2013)

+ Horton, Judy: “California Japanese-Style Gardens: Tradition and Practice” (Pacific Horticulture)

+ LA Conservancy: “Japanese American Heritage” (LAConservancy.org)

+ LA Conservancy: “Japanese American History at Terminal Island” (LAConservancy.org) 

+ Levine, Bettijane: “Every Garden Tells a Story” (Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2007)

+ Morrison, Patt: “Before Pearl Harbor, L.A. was home to thriving Japanese communities. Here’s what they were like” (Los Angeles Times, December 7, 2021)

+ Olds, Clifton C.: The Japanese Garden (Bowdoin.edu, updated August 27, 2008)

+ “Pasadena Civic Groups Get $85,000 Under Will” (Los Angeles Times, February 3, 1949 – via ProQuest)

+ “Pasadenan Honored” (The Pasadena Post, June 4, 1931 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Pitsenbarger, Steven: “Japanese Tea Garden” (Sutori.com)

+ “Rites Conducted for Mrs. Stearns” (Pasadena Star-News, January 24, 1949 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Roberts, Mike: “Japanese Gardens 101 – Part 1: The History of Japanese Gardens” (samuraitours.com)

+ Shoop, C. Fred: “Garden Tour Always Pleasure” (Pasadena Independent, August 24, 1961 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Spinelli, Matt: Drone’s Eye Garden Tour (@SSJG on YouTube, March 14, 2025) 

+ “Stearns Garden Among Finest in Southland” (Pasadena Star-News, October 12, 1947 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden website