Pasadena's Storrier Stearns is a masterwork of Japanese garden design. While it'd be easy to get swept away by the tranquility here, 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.