Fort Worth Japanese Garden

The garden was built in 1973 and many of the plants and construction materials were donated by Fort Worth's sister city Nagaoka, Japan.

The Fort Worth Japanese Garden was built into a little valley, originally a gullied bluff, that opened onto the floodplain of the Trinity River's Clear Fork branch.

Enlarged as a gravel quarry, the site also served at various times as a watering hole for cattle, a trash dump, and a squatter's camp.

At the heart of the landscape is a system of ponds, surrounded by hills (tsukiyama), and enclosed by a network of interconnected paths, pavilions, bridges, and decks.

Likewise, a 'taijitu' (yin-yang symbol), a graceful Indochinese Buddha, and three stone monkeys (Mizaru, Kikazaru, and Iwazaru), are all atypical additions unique to this Fort Worth exhibit.

Fort Worth's version is intended to be an interactive karesansui exhibit, in which visitors may ascend the flat-topped cone via steps, and view the composition from above.

This highly unusual (but fun[citation needed]) addition to a Japanese garden is ultimately a cosmological symbol of Chinese origin.

Two karesansui (dry landscape) exhibits at the Fort Worth Japanese Garden are evocative of rivers that originate in mountainous terrain.

It is a garden metaphor of the Colorado River, which rises in the Rocky Mountains, flows across an elevated plateau, and descends into the depths of the Grand Canyon.