Taki Handa

Handa taught in Tokyo for a few years as a young woman. In 1908, while living in Britain, Handa designed a seven-acre Japanese garden at Cowden Castle in Clackmannanshire for Ella Christie,^[2] who had traveled extensively in Asia and wanted to recreate the Japanese garden aesthetic.^[1][5] The garden was admired and popular,^[6][7] and Christie continued to employ Japanese caretakers for the garden, pond, and teahouse, to maintain Handa's ideas.^[8] In 1955, after Christie had died and Cowden Castle was demolished, the Japanese Garden was closed to public visits; in time, it was vandalised and fell into ruin.^[4][9]

On her return to Japan, Handa taught botany, horticulture and English at Doshisha Women's College in Kyoto. She retired from teaching in 1919, and was in charge of a family orchard at Mizusawa beginning in the 1920s, until 1932, when she left the operation in her stepson's care.^[2]

Handa was a fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society.^[10]

Handa married in 1910, to Seiichi Nakanome, a widowed physician with six children. They had two daughters together. "Within two years getting married, I became a wife, a mother and a grandmother, which are all interesting experiences for me," she wrote in 1912.^[2] She was widowed when her husband died in 1938; she died in 1956, in her mid-eighties.^[2]

Taki Nakanome's granddaughter Tamae Hoshi visited the Japanese Garden in Clackmannanshire in 2010. Restoration began in 2013 by Christie's great-great-niece Sara Stewart,^[8] and the garden was reopened to visitors in 2019.^[4][11]