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The Grim Cheaper and I are finally getting around to landscaping the backyard of our new house, so to say I’m into gardens lately would be an understatement. If I knew how to use Pinterest (I swear I cannot figure that site out), I’d be pinning foliage design ideas left and right. Instead I’ve been visiting gardens IRL and snapping copious photos. One idyll that I only just learned about thanks to a brief mention in the March 2018 issue of Los Angeles magazine is Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden, a bucolic space tucked away on a sleepy residential street in Pasadena. When I discovered upon further digging that the spot is also a filming location, I decided I had to visit it stat for both backyard inspo and blogging purposes.
Originally commissioned by Charles Storrier Stearns and his wife, Ellamae Sheppard, on the grounds of their sprawling Pasadena manse (which you can see a photo of here) in 1935, the 2-acre glen took a whopping 7 years to complete.
The couple called upon landscape architect Kinzuchi Fujii to design the picturesque space.
Sadly, shortly before completing the project, Fujii was sent to an internment camp where he remained until the end of World War II. Though he considered the garden his crowning achievement, he never returned to see his vision finalized.
What he created is nothing short of magical, with walking paths;
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two large ponds;
a 15-foot devil’s bridge made of granite,
a teahouse that was initially constructed in Japan and then taken apart before being shipped to Pasadena, whereupon it was reassembled at the garden;
numerous footbridges;
and a plethora of plant varieties including Japanese maples, Chinese elms, and redwood trees.
Upon Ellamae’s death in 1949, the Storrier Stearns estate was sold at auction to an antiques dealer named Gamelia Haddad Poulsen. Though she subdivided the vast property into seven separate parcels and razed the massive mansion, she held onto the Japanese garden as well as an adjoining plot on which she built a modest home.
Gamelia cherished the tranquil space, caring for and maintaining its beauty until the state declared imminent domain on a 1/3-acre portion of it in 1975 as part of the Interstate 710 expansion. With the fate of the garden in flux, she left it to deteriorate. The ponds eventually dried up, the plants shriveled, and the teahouse burned down.
When Gamelia passed away in 1985, her son, Jim Haddad, and his wife, Connie, inherited the garden and the home. The 710 expansion had still yet to see fruition by that time, so the couple finally decided to restore the property. The painstaking project took 15 years to complete, but the ponds were eventually filled, the teahouse was rebuilt to exacting specifications, the foliage was replanted, and Fujii’s vision was restored.
The Haddads kept the garden, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, mainly private, opening it up to the outside world solely as a special events venue and for filming.
It was not until 2016 that the couple made the site available to tour.
Today, Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden is open to the public every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and the second and last Sunday of each month.
Thanks to the Pasadena Star-News, I learned that the pilot of Pure Genius (originally named Bunker Hill) was lensed on the premises in 2016. (Though the article misreported the location of filming as Arlington Garden, which is situated across the street, one quick scan through the episode told me that shooting had actually taken place at Storrier Stearns.)
The garden appeared throughout the episode, masking as the grounds of the supposed Palo Alto-area Bunker Hill Center for the Advancement of Medicine.
As you can see in the screen capture below, the exterior of a Bunker Hill building was digitally added to the background of one of the scenes featuring the garden.
While I know that Storrier Stearns must have been utilized in other filmings over the years, I was unable to dig up any other productions it appeared in.
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Until next time, Happy Stalking!
Stalk It: Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden, from the pilot episode of Pure Genius, is located at 270 Arlington Drive in Pasadena. The property is open Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and the second and last Sunday of each month from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is $10. You can visit the garden’s official website here.
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