Kenroku-en

Successive Maeda lords worked on this ground from 1676 onward, expanding and rebuilding it across roughly two hundred years. It opened to the public in 1874 and is consistently named one of Japan's three great gardens.

The six

The framework comes from a Song-dynasty Chinese text describing what an ideal garden requires. The qualities come in three opposed pairs: spaciousness and seclusion, artifice and antiquity, water and broad views. Each pair works against the other — a garden large enough to feel open cannot easily feel intimate.

Kenroku-en solves it by being a strolling garden: you do not view it from one point. The composition changes as you walk, and the qualities take turns.

The Kotoji lantern — two legs of unequal length, standing at the edge of Kasumi pond — is the most photographed object in the city. It is also much smaller than the photographs imply.

The water that arrives uphill

The ponds are fed by a channel dug in 1632 that brings water more than ten kilometres from the Sai River, and it runs by gravity and siphon alone — no pumps, then or now. The fountain in the garden, one of the oldest in Japan, is driven purely by the pressure difference from the pond above it.

That is a seventeenth-century civil engineering project undertaken so that a garden would have moving water. It says as much about Kaga's wealth as the gold does.

Yukitsuri, and the reason to come in winter

From 1 November the gardeners rig yukitsuri — ropes hung from central poles in conical arrays and tied to the branches of the pines, to carry the weight of wet Sea of Japan snow.

They are not decorative and they are strikingly beautiful, and the sight of a hundred trees under rope cones against grey November sky is the version of this garden that Japanese people travel for. They come down in mid-March.