Take part in a Japanese tea ceremony, stroll amidst bamboo groves, azaleas, and Japanese irises and you'll feel you've traveled much further east than just Long Island. John P. Humes Japanese Stroll Garden, in Mill Neck, is an exquisite reproduction of authentic Shinto and Buddhist Japanese gardens, which strive to represent Zen precepts and cosmology, and embody the transient beauty inherent in nature's impermanence. United States Ambassador to Japan, John P. Humes created these gardens to follow Japanese tradition spanning several different periods of garden aesthetics. Visitors who take the time to understand the underlying philosophy may find a spiritual experience in a visit to the Humes Japanese Stroll Garden.
The Humes Japanese Stroll Garden in Mill Neck, N.Y. is designed on a very sloping 4-acre site of deeply wooded land adjacent to a wild life sanctuary. The garden is one of few northeast examples of traditional Japanese garden design.
The garden is a combination of several design concepts and immediately evokes (quite successfully) the sensation of yamazato, the transcendent feeling of a deep, remote mountain hamlet. These design concepts are conditions that were common of, and quite mandatory for Japanese garden and landscape design. There is a scenic representation of a lake garden (without an 'island') which contains a water condition dating far back into Heian imperial design (circa 790) in the 'bottle gourd' traditional configuration. The lake garden is authentically replicated on a plateau of land midway through the garden, at a point approximately midway up the elevation. The lake is also pleasantly viewed from the windows of the cha-shitsu (tea house), so participants in wabi-cha (tea ceremony) will have meditative surroundings.
The water of the lake garden religiously evoked a principle tenet of Zen Buddhism: paradise or eternity was a water garden and was the heavenly abode of Amida (a very benevolent deity).
The property is richly wooded and secluded from the immediate environment of the affluent Nassau county area. The property elevation is a metaphor of a spiritual journey into the mountainside, with origins in Edo period imperial garden design. There is an elevation change in the topography of approximately 50-60 feet or so from entrance to summit.
The garden is the classic representation of Japanese garden design with constant repetition of threshold and passage, and the garden is a series of enclosures and entries with the 'hill gardens' and the 'flat gardens'.