The pond had been leaking for years. The irrigation lines were old and failing. The soil, beneath the pines and shrubs that had anchored the place since 2013, had gone depleted — tired ground that could no longer hold much life. And so for more than a year, the gates at Yume Japanese Gardens of Tucson stayed shut while a small crew set about the unglamorous work of resurrection: rebuilding a microbiome, replumbing a garden, and rethinking what it means to grow Japan in the Sonoran Desert.
On Oct. 11, the gates open again.
Yume — the word means "dream" in Japanese — occupies roughly two-thirds of an acre on North Alvernon Way, a block south of the Tucson Botanical Gardens. It is a compact place, but a dense one: seven traditional Kyoto-style residential courtyard gardens, plus a pond garden, a bamboo grove and a dry river garden, all arranged in the pocket-garden fashion that also defines its new parent institution. Its buildings speak in the accent of sukiya, the Japanese architectural style prized for simplicity, natural materials and openness to the landscape. There is a museum of traditional Japanese folk artifacts and what its stewards describe as the largest collection of ikebana containers in the United States.
None of it was inevitable. The story of Yume begins with a Belgian teenager who left home at 18 to chase a fascination with Japan.
Patricia Deridder spent 15 years in Asia, learning the language and absorbing the culture. She later raised two children in Wisconsin before deciding, in midlife, to seek a new adventure in Arizona. What she found on Alvernon Way was not a garden at all. It was a treeless lot of compacted desert clay — the kind of ground that in Tucson resists a shovel as much as it resists water. The property came with a 1926 adobe house whose basement had been dug from clay excavated on the very spot, a fitting prologue, as the garden's own history puts it, for the excavation that followed.
Deridder began reshaping the land in 2011. Yume opened to the public in January 2013. She has said the garden was meant as a place of meditation, peace and education, and as a tribute to her parents. "I had a mentor when I was in Japan who said at a certain age you have to return what you have received," she told Arizona Public Media. "And it's my way of returning."
For a while, it worked. Visitors described the gardens as calming in a way that was hard to explain. But the years took their toll. Attendance was low, and the maintenance demands of an authentic Japanese garden — the pruning, the raking, the constant tending — are not the kind of thing that can be deferred. Last year, Deridder approached the Tucson Botanical Gardens about taking over the property. Michelle Conklin, the Botanical Gardens' president and CEO, had spoken at Yume's original grand opening more than a decade earlier. She remembered standing there thinking, "Oh, if only someday we could be a part of this garden experience."
Conklin and Deridder had been talking about the future of the two gardens for three or four years. In late May 2025, the timing finally aligned. The Botanical Gardens acquired Yume, describing it as a historic agreement between neighbors. Deridder stayed on as a member of the garden's advisory board.
"Yume began as a treeless space with compacted desert soil," she said at the time. "Over the years the land has been reshaped and sculpted with care. It was intended as a heartfelt tribute to Japanese culture, and the well-being offered by Japanese garden design. Under the caring stewardship of Tucson Botanical Gardens, I know that these intentions will be respected, and Yume will continue to be a place of restorative beauty."
What followed was not a simple spruce-up. As Adam Ferral-Wartman, the Botanical Gardens' director of horticulture, put it, staff decided a cultural garden deserved full respect. "We needed to do a kind of full overhaul and makeover of the space," he said. They addressed the structural integrity of the buildings and the hard infrastructure, and began new plantings.
Because the Botanical Gardens had no deep expertise in Japanese gardening, they brought in Takuhiro Yamada, a landscape architect of international reputation, who visited the property several times and continues to advise by live video. The aim, Ferral-Wartman said, was "to make sure that we are providing as authentic a Japanese garden experience as possible in the Sonoran Desert." He acknowledged the obvious tension in that ambition. "It's not completely possible," he said, "because Japan doesn't have any deserts."
Robin Lansing, now Yume's head gardener, has described the practical work that began in May 2025. Some remarkable anchor plants survived — beautiful pines and shrubs that had held their ground through the lean years. But the soil beneath them had been exhausted, and the irrigation system was ancient and largely nonfunctional. Staff started a soil regeneration program, which Lansing likened to taking probiotics for a troubled stomach: the goal was to rebuild healthy microbiomes so the ground could support life again. A donor then funded a complete replumbing of the irrigation system.
"Having the consistent water to the garden has enabled us to plant more plantings and ground cover and things like that it wasn't able to sustain before," Lansing said.
The pond, which had been leaking, was fully rebuilt with another donor gift. Its deck is nearly finished. Small fences and gravel top dressing are going in. A Canadian cedar bridge has been installed and carefully wrapped so that it will be in mint condition for opening day. One more tree still sits in its pot along the corridor leading to the bridge, waiting for its moment.
Lansing is particularly eager about two additions. The first is bamboo — a plant that, as she noted, grows remarkably well in Arizona but is rarely seen because it spreads so aggressively. The second is the wisteria arbor, known in Japanese as a fujidana. The old structure was built so low that most visitors had to duck beneath it. Workers cut the vines back last winter, and the regrowth this year has been knotty rather than gracefully draping. "Next year the wisteria on that will be spectacular," Lansing said. "This year it kind of grew in knots, and so it won't be as lovely and draping, but it will be up, and it will be a shady spot, and it will look down this lane to this beautiful bridge."
Her favorite corner is the tsukubai, the stone water basin near the tea garden, used in tea ceremonies. Before entering the tea house, participants stop to cleanse themselves at the stone — a ritual, she explained, that is as much inward as outward. "Part of the tea ceremony is the cleanse of your mind, soul, body," she said. "And then even entering the tea house, there are things that you do to say you are leaving the world behind. You keep shedding the world so that you are prepared for tea."
The restoration is not finished, and by the garden's own logic it never will be. More planting is needed. Small details around the pond remain incomplete. But the core work — the water, the soil, the pond, the buildings — is done, and the Botanical Gardens believe the space is ready to be shared again.
"Yume had a lot of different maintenance that required it to be closed until it met the high standards that Tucson Botanical Gardens has for its gardens," Ferral-Wartman said. "After over a year of major infrastructure work like irrigation replacement, soil rehabilitation, pond reconstruction and building refurbishing, we believe the space is now ready to share with the Tucson community."
In a written statement, he added: "While a garden is never 'finished,' we believe Yume is at a place that honors the great horticultural practices of Japan and is able to support educational and cultural programming."
That programming is already taking shape. In the coming months, Yume will host an eight-week haiku workshop, a fall haiku walk, a Japanese basket weaving workshop and a Voices of Autumn concert. The garden's stated mission is to immerse visitors in layers of Japanese culture and heritage — through landscape design, festivals, ceremonies, performing arts, museum and gallery exhibitions, and classes — and to serve as, in Ferral-Wartman's phrase, "a haven of greenery and tranquility for the Tucson community."
There is a small mural on one of the buildings, inspired by Hokusai's "Red Fuji," that blends traditional Japanese imagery with the desert light around it. It is the kind of detail that captures what Yume has always been: an improbable transplant, tended with care, that somehow took root in hard clay. For more than a year it sat quiet behind closed gates. On Oct. 11, the lost garden is found again.