| Taki Handa | |
| Other Names: | Handa Taki, Nakanome Taki, Taki Nakanome |
| Birth Date: | 1871 |
| Birth Place: | Kurume, Kyushu |
| Death Date: | 1956 |
| Occupation: | Horticulturist, landscape designer |
Taki Handa (1871–1956) was a Japanese horticulturist, best known for designing and directing the construction of a Japanese garden in Scotland in 1908.
Handa was born in Kurume, Kyushu. Her father was a prison guard who also mended umbrellas; her older brother Handa Hisao was a military physician and helped support the family. She studied Chinese literature, weaving, and English as a girl, and was baptised as a Christian at age 16, then trained to be a teacher at a school in Fukuoka.[1] She attended Doshisha Women's College in Kyoto, and Mary Florence Denton, an American faculty member there, encouraged Handa to seek further studies abroad.[2] [3] She attended Studley College in England from 1906 to 1908.[4]
Handa taught in Tokyo for a few years as a young woman. In 1908, while living in Britain, Handa designed a seven-acre garden at Cowden Castle in Clackmannanshire for Ella Christie, who had traveled extensively in Asia and wanted to recreate the Japanese garden aesthetic.[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.[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.
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. She was widowed when her husband died in 1938; she died in 1956, in her mid-eighties.
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, and the garden was reopened to visitors in 2019.[11]