UCLA must not abandon the Hannah Carter Japanese Garden

The Hannah Carter Japanese Garden was the first Japanese-style garden of its scale to be built in Southern California after World War II. When it was donated to UCLA, it was meant to promote East-West understanding as it did for me and my students so very long ago.

I first visited the Hannah Carter Japanese Garden in 1973, with my fourth-grade students. The garden visit was the culmination of their social studies unit that compared Japanese and American life and culture.

It was during this visit that I fell in love with this remarkable living work of art, which has been so exquisitely designed to include waterfalls and a reflective, moon-gazing koi pond, and to compactly showcase nature in all of its seasonal splendor!

Bravo to the heirs of Hannah Carter for their valiant effort to save and preserve this magnificent garden named after their mother. Without their lawsuit, UCLA would have sold the garden long ago to the highest secret bidder without any provision to preserve the garden. In order to protect their parents’ precious gift to UCLA, they were compelled to sue the university – donors beware!

Upon the death of Hannah Carter, even as UCLA Chancellor Gene Block was sending his letter of condolence to the heirs in which he promised that UCLA would honor their mother’s memory by upholding the care for the garden in perpetuity, his financial henchmen were concurrently devising the scheme by which they could eliminate that very requirement and make it possible to sell the garden without restriction.

Contrary to all of UCLA’s excuses to justify the abandonment of the garden, the infrastructure to continue the care of the garden exists. There is proximate parking and the shuttle service capability to serve public access to the garden while respecting the rights of neighbors and their property. UCLA has the community willing to partner and support the garden in every way. The academic departments for whom the garden could actively contribute a vital educational and cultural role include the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, UCLA Department of Art and UCLA Extension’s horticulture and landscape architecture divisions. The garden is a place of great healing and serenity, which has obvious medicinal and therapeutic benefits worthy of study by the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA as well.

UCLA’s administration intentionally failed to take any of the above realities into account whatsoever. Instead, it unilaterally acted without imagination, vision, creativity or sensitivity toward the donors’ heirs, the academic community and the community at large that desperately wanted to make the garden fiscally sustainable.

It was a fait accompli before any of us got involved, but it took us a long time to realize and believe that all UCLA was ever interested in was a quick sale, despite the outcry the sale might engender.

Shame on UCLA for its mercenary tactics and reckless abandonment of such a valuable public resource that rightfully belongs to all the citizens of this city and state.

Shame on the California assistant attorney general, whose failure to deny UCLA’s request to change the terms of its contract made the sale of the garden possible.

Without notification to all the donor’s heirs or to the locally impacted public, the hearing on this matter took place in Alameda, and therefore, no timely public oppositional input was presented.

No thorough, independent assessment of the Hannah Carter Japanese Garden was ever undertaken by the office charged with protecting California’s priceless public assets, nor was any input solicited from the heirs of Carter in advance of the hearing.

Both the donors and the public’s trust was violated by the duplicitous actions of UCLA administrators and the lack of due diligence by the California attorney general’s office.

How bitterly ironic that UCLA, a world-renowned center for the study of lost civilizations and cultures, has so significantly contributed to the loss of civilization and culture in Los Angeles by its calculated and ruthless actions to sell this garden, as found in the archives of the UCLA’s research library. The content of those files was the foundation for the case against UCLA.

Now we are only left to hope and pray that a benevolent private buyer will partner with a local civic foundation to enable the garden, plus the house to which it is attached, to be sold as one entity – fully restored and open to the public once again!

The garden and the attached house could be developed into an East-West cultural center, and that would bring the garden full circle.

How tragic it will be if it never again realizes its lofty purpose!

Barbanell is a UCLA alumna who graduated in 1971, received her teacher training at UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies in 1972 and has California lifetime teaching credentials for secondary art and elementary education.