Three Gardens in One Walk: Why Shinjuku Gyo-en Rewards a Slow Morning
Step through the Shinjuku Gate and the city's noise falls away within a minute. What you enter is not a single garden but a blend of three traditions laid side by side: a formal French garden and an English landscape garden in the north, and a traditional Japanese garden in the south. The grounds began as the residence of the Naitō family in the Edo period, were remodelled with the help of the Versailles-trained landscape architect Henry Martinet, and opened as the Shinjuku Imperial Garden in 1906. Rebuilt after wartime damage, the garden reopened to the public in 1949 and is now managed as a national garden. It is the kind of place where a two-hour stroll turns into half a day.
Lawns, Ponds and a Greenhouse of Tropical Plants
Your walk moves through distinct rooms, each with its own mood:
- The English landscape garden — wide open lawns ringed by flowering cherry trees, the spot where Tokyoites spread out picnic sheets in spring.
- The French formal garden — a symmetrical layout of paths and planting that reads best from a distance, so look back as you cross it.
- The Japanese traditional garden — large ponds with islands and bridges, manicured shrubs and trees, pavilions, and the Kyu Goryotei (Taiwan Pavilion), built for the wedding of the Showa Emperor and the one major structure to survive the wartime air raids.
- The greenhouse — horticulture has been carried on under glass here since 1892, and the present greenhouse, built in the 1950s, holds over 1,700 tropical and subtropical plant species on permanent display.
- The trees — the garden holds more than 20,000 of them, including majestic Himalayan cedars that rise above the rest of the canopy, tulip trees, cypresses, and plane trees first planted in Japan in the Imperial Gardens.
There is also a traditional Japanese tea house, a restaurant, an information centre and an art gallery on the grounds. Literary travellers may recognise the setting: Yasunari Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain has a character declare, "You can stretch out. It's like getting out of Japan," and the garden is the setting of the 2013 anime film The Garden of Words.
Time Your Visit to the Cherry Blossoms, the Maples or the Chrysanthemums
The garden's calendar gives you three strong reasons to plan around a season. In spring, roughly 1,500 cherry trees bloom in succession: the weeping cherry from late March, the Somei (Tokyo) cherry into early April, and the Kanzan on into late April. This is Tokyo's favourite hanami ground, and large crowds gather during blossom season — on weekends at peak bloom, advance online reservations are required, and the garden stays open seven days a week from late March to late April, including Mondays.
Autumn is the quieter counterpart: foliage typically runs from mid-November to mid-December, with maples especially fine around the Japanese garden and on Momijiyama, the "maple mountain" on the garden's eastern side. The first half of November also brings the Chrysanthemum Exhibition to the Japanese garden, with numerous flower displays — and again, the garden opens daily through the exhibition.
Whatever the season, arrive at opening time. The garden closes on Mondays (or the following day when Monday is a public holiday) and over the New Year period, and closing hours shift with the season — earlier in autumn and winter, later in midsummer — so check before you set out. Give yourself at least two hours; three lets you take in the greenhouse and still sit with a view of the pond. If you come only for one thing, make it the Kyu Goryotei reflected in the water of the Japanese garden.
Getting In
The garden has three gates, each with its own approach. The Shinjuku Gate is about a ten-minute walk east from JR Shinjuku Station's New South Exit, or five minutes from Shinjukugyoemmae Station on the Marunouchi Line. The Okido Gate is five minutes from Shinjukugyoemmae Station, and the Sendagaya Gate five minutes from JR Sendagaya Station on the local Chūō-Sōbu Line. The garden is also a short walk from Shinjuku-sanchōme Station on the Tokyo Metro Fukutoshin Line — four minutes from exit C1.
Beyond the Gates
When you leave, you are well placed to keep going. The neon of Shinjuku is a short walk from the Shinjuku Gate, and Tokyo's wider sights are an easy train ride away: the temples of Asakusa, including Sensō-ji, and Tokyo Tower in Minato make natural next stops if you are building a day across the city.
Shinjuku Gyo-en asks only that you choose your season and your gate, and give it the better part of a morning. Check the garden's calendar, pick a weekday outside the blossom rush if you can, and let the lawns, ponds and greenhouses do the rest.