INTERNATIONAL JAPANESE GARDEN
TRAINING CENTER
PORTLAND, OR
Hands, heart, and the living practice of landscape
Portland, Oregon · Professional Education & Cultural Exchange · 2009–2021
The International Japanese Garden Training Center at Portland Japanese Garden was established to teach the living, formative art of Japanese gardens through a combination of traditional hands-on practice and contemporary professional education. Recognized by the American Public Gardens Association with its 2018 Program Excellence Award, the Center became an international place for landscape professionals to learn not only techniques, but the cultural and aesthetic principles that give those techniques meaning.
As Founding Advisor, Lecturer, Liaison and Teacher, Desirae D. Wood helped develop the Center's curriculum, strategic planning, budgets, professional programming and outreach while connecting its educational work with the Garden's horticultural and design departments. She worked with visiting Japanese garden masters, tea practitioners, landscape professionals and educators to develop programs that brought traditional knowledge into direct conversation with contemporary landscape practice.
The flagship Waza to Kokoro: Hands and Heart seminars centered on learning through making. Professionals worked directly with stone, plants, bamboo and traditional tools while studying garden history, aesthetics, design and the culture of tea. Other programs explored designing with nature, garden composition, pruning, bamboo fence construction, stone paths, organic gardening and the raking and care of dry landscape gardens. The Center's approach emphasized that Japanese garden knowledge is not simply a collection of techniques—it is a way of observing, responding and developing judgment through sustained practice.
Desirae also developed and taught the Japanese Garden Design Intensive: With an Eye Towards Nature, a three-day professional program focused on the Japanese approach to designing with nature and its contemporary application. Through lectures, field observation and hands-on design exercises, participants were encouraged to look first at the landscape itself—to understand landform, vegetation, climate, views and atmosphere before determining how to intervene.
This approach continues through Dobro Design. The core principles of the Training Center have evolved into Japanese Garden Design Intensive: Mountain Inspired Landscapes, a professional workshop held at Denver Botanic Gardens that considers Japanese garden principles through the landscapes, ecology and climate of the American West. Rather than teaching a style to reproduce, the work asks how a particular way of seeing can help designers create landscapes that belong to their own place.
The experience established a lasting belief that landscape knowledge is learned through both hands and heart: through observation, repetition, making, teaching and care. It is a philosophy that continues to shape Dobro Design's approach to landscape as a living practice—one that begins by listening to place and develops through craft, collaboration and time.
Project Team
Diane Durston/Curator of Art, Culture & Education · Kristin Faurest, Ph.D./Director · Sadafumi Uchiyama/Garden Curator · Kanako Yanagi/Program Manager
Recognition
American Public Gardens Association · Program Excellence Award, 2018