Fantastical rockwork and koi pond at Japanese Tea Garden in San Antonio

The Japanese Tea Garden in San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park has distinctive rock architecture, a 60-foot waterfall, koi pond, gardens, and a wartime story.… Read More

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While hunting for faux bois works throughout San Antonio last month, I couldn’t miss the chance to visit the Japanese Tea Garden in Brackenridge Park. I was last there 11 years ago, and I was eager to see its distinctive rock architecture again.

A torii gate of faux bois — or trabajo rustico, as they call it in San Antonio — marks the garden’s entrance. Hand-crafted in 1942 by Dionicio Rodriguez, the gate is a work of art but also a relic of wartime passions. The gate reads Chinese Tea Garden, not Japanese Tea Garden. That’s because the gate was built the year after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. As the United States went to war, the city evicted the Japanese family who’d lived in the garden since 1926, running a restaurant there. The garden was renamed, and a Chinese-American family took over the restaurant.

Forty-two years later, in 1984, the Japanese Tea Garden name was officially restored, and the torii gate remains as a historical artifact.

The garden was built on the scarred site of an old limestone quarry and cement plant that closed in 1908. When Brackenridge Park was being developed, park commissioner Ray Lambert envisioned a sunken garden and lily pond on the site, and he used prison labor to get it built in 1918-1919. A thatch-roofed limestone pavilion was constructe