Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens in Palm Beach County, Florida

Photograph: MorikamiLakeHouse.jpg by Fragments at en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Palm Beach County attraction

Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens

Palm Beach County · South Florida & the Keys

Japanese gardens on land given to the county by the last man left from a Japanese farming colony that failed here a century ago.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

In 1903 Jo Sakai, a graduate of New York University from Miyazu, signed an agreement with the Florida East Coast Railway to settle a colony of Japanese farmers near Boca Raton. The Yamato Colony grew pineapples for northern markets until Cuban competition pushed the growers to winter vegetables, and by the Second World War almost all of them had gone; in May 1942 the government confiscated the farmland still in Japanese hands for a military installation. George Sukeji Morikami, one of the last settlers remaining, stayed on and gave his land to Palm Beach County, and the park opened in 1977. The gardens are called Roji-en, six distinct gardens designed by Hoichi Kurisu across sixteen acres inside a wider two-hundred-acre park, and the original Yamato-kan building holds exhibition rooms ringing an open-air courtyard with a dry garden of gravel and stone. The park covers 188.5 acres at 4000 Morikami Park Road in Delray Beach. The six gardens were completed in 2001 and run from a Heian-period garden of lakes and islands, through a Karesansui garden of rock and gravel with no plants in it at all, to a Meiji-period garden with Western influence worked into it. The main museum building opened in 1993 and holds more than seven thousand objects, a tea house where ceremonies and classes are given, and the Cornell Cafe

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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