The Anderson Japanese Gardens: A Swamp Becomes a Landscape

In the late nineteen seventies, a Rockford businessman named John Anderson visited the Portland Japanese Garden in Oregon and returned home unsettled in a productive way. He had a property along Spring Creek on the north side of the city, a low-lying parcel that collected water and had never been much use. He had a vision for what it could become.

He contacted Hoichi Kurisu, a Japanese landscape architect based in Portland who had worked on gardens across the Pacific Northwest, and brought him to Rockford. Kurisu looked at the swampy creek land and said it could be done. Construction began in nineteen seventy-eight.

What they built over the following years was a twelve-acre traditional Japanese strolling garden: koi ponds fed by Spring Creek, stone lanterns placed with precise attention to line of sight, wooden bridges, a teahouse, a waterfall, a dry garden of raked gravel, and paths that revealed the landscape in sequence rather than all at once. Each view was composed. Each sound was considered. The density of craft involved in a serious Japanese garden, the shaping of a pine limb over a decade, the angle of a stepping stone relative to what you see when you look up, is the kind of effort that does not announce itself.

In nineteen ninety-eight, John and Linda Anderson donated the gardens to the Rockford Rotary Charitable Association. It operates today as a nonprofit.

The Journal of Japanese Gardening named the Anderson Japanese Gardens the finest Japanese garden in North America in two thousand four. Visitors still come from across the country. The swamp that nobody wanted became one of the more quietly exceptional places in Illinois.