John P. Humes Japanese Stroll Garden
New York outdoor attraction
The John P. Humes Japanese Stroll Garden is a 7-acre (28,000 m2) Japanese garden in Mill Neck, New York, providing a retreat for passive recreation and contemplation.
History
Upon return from a trip to Kyoto, Japan in 1960, John Portner Humes, a lawyer then ambassador, began work on a Japanese garden. As a lawyer Humes worked for Mitsubishi and traveled to Japan for business. The garden was designed between 1962 and 1965 by Douglas and Jone DeFaya who used Japanese shrubs, trees and ground cover as well as symbolic placement of stones. The focal point of the garden is an imported tea house, in the design of the Ashikaga period, that was acquired in 1962. The sandalwood tea house was prefabricated in Taiwan and featured straw matting and rice paper door panels.
The garden was two-acres in size.
Humes was the U.S. ambassador to Austria from Oct. 29, 1969 to March 6, 1975. While the Humes family was living in Austria, the garden fell into disrepair and on their return, a landscape architect, Stephen Morrell, was hired full-time in 1982 to restore and enlarge the garden.
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This entry incorporates text from “John P. Humes Japanese Stroll Garden” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.