Hannah Carter
Japanese Garden

In 1923 landscape architect A.E. Hanson created a Hawaiian-inspired retreat for Harry Calendar in the Bel Air subdivision of Los Angeles. Gordon Guiberson purchased the property in 1959 and commissioned Nagao Sakurai and Kazuo Nakamura to create a Japanese-style garden on the steep 1.5-acre hillside below the residence. Sakurai had recently immigrated to the U.S. and had previously designed the Imperial Japanese Gardens at the 1939 international expositions in San Francisco and New York. Nakamura was a renowned garden expert from Kyoto, Japan.

Background

The new plan kept intact elements from Hanson’s design, including a Hawaiian garden, a twenty-foot waterfall, and a stone bathhouse. Sakuri and Nakamura sculpted a dramatic garden, inspired by those in Kyoto, into the steep hillside, using 400 tons of lichen-covered stones from Santa Paula Canyon north of Los Angeles, and another several hundred stones from rock quarries at Mt. Baldy, east of the city. From the entry at the base of the hill, stone paths lead up to a central koi pond edged by a black pebble beach. Circular stepping stones and stone bridges provide passage across the water, with a stone pagoda positioned at the bottom edge of the pond and a Japanese teahouse overlooking the water from its western side.

Dense plantings, many with Japanese origins, surround the pond, including pines, bamboo, magnolia, and camellia trees. At the garden’s highest point sits the hokura (family shrine), which contains a hand-carved gilt Buddha. On trips to Japan, the Guibersons personally selected the entry gate, hokura, and tea house that were imported for installation in the garden, along with stone lanterns, water basins, and carved and natural stones with symbolic significance that line the paths. The historic garden, completed in 1961, represents one of the preeminent examples of postwar, residential Japanese-style gardens.

The Hannah Carter Japanese Garden was also a “favorite place” of a young Pamela Burton, who in her Pioneers Oral History with TCLF recalled how she would climb over the fence to get in. On one occasion she snuck in a visitor who was in town for the weekend, the influential land artist Robert Smithson.

In 1964 the Chancellor of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Dr. Franklin D. Murphy, expressed an interest in acquiring the garden for use by the university for several years, in order to “build some beauty and felicity” into the UCLA campus. “I was always bothered by the fact that Harvard and other universities had wonderful gardens,” Murphy said, “and UCLA had absolutely nothing.” That same year University of California Regent Edward W. Carter purchased the house and garden. He negotiated an agreement to subdivide the property and provided funds to UCLA to purchase the garden.

Extensive flooding in 1969 resulted in a mudslide which damaged the garden, during which time UCLA Campus Architect and Professor Koichi Kawana was engaged. Kawana maintained a long relationship with UCLA beginning in the 1950s as a student, continuing into the 1960s as a teaching fellow for the Art Department, and becoming a principal campus architect in 1963, a position he held until his retirement in 1989. While engaged with his UCLA duties, including the reconstruction of the Hannah Carter Japanese Garden, he was also an active private practitioner, founding Environmental Design Associates, a Los Angeles-based design firm in 1966.

In 1982 Carter amended the terms of his donation to name the garden in honor of his wife, Hannah and, most significantly, to require the university to "retain the garden portion in perpetuity." Carter also said that the residence, part of the original 1964 bequest, could eventually be sold to provide an endowment to maintain the garden and provide funding for other purposes. In 1999 the university reaffirmed its commitment to the terms to “maintain the garden portion in perpetuity” along with the rest of the bequest.