In the year of the dragon, a walk in a Japanese garden in Newberry

Recent renovations at the Well’s Japanese garden in Newberry are worth showing off.

with the first full day of spring happening tomorrow many people may visit the wells Japanese Garden in Newberry our Cassidy buyer did just that today talking with city leaders about recent Renovations there fman Welles Drew from the uh Golden Gate Park um Japanese garden from San Francisco he was an architect and went to Georgia Tech and then came home and um began and doing this Japanese garden landscape architect Laura Dukes is speaking about the origins of the wells Japanese Garden on a Brisk but sunny day in this city of Newberry the garden was originally designed by W Fulmer wells in 1930 so it was meant to be part of his garden you would kind of stroll down his Hill and come and enjoy it 40 years following the garden’s creation the Wells Family donated it to the City of Newberry according to the city’s parks recreation and tourism director Colin Shey there was a period where uh you know it was under the city’s maintenance and and it kind of it had it had fallen off a little bit so we wanted to really look at putting some time and energy back into bringing it to what his vision was for the garden the time and energy needed to bring the wells Vision back to life started to come together in 2020 and in 2021 funding was secured and Renovations began we wanted to put a lot of emphasis on bringing the ponds and themselves back to where they were they had gotten overgrown um and so we wanted to make sure that those ponds were really able to be brought back to life with the help from Laura and others the renovations fully embody the Japanese garden Spirit specifically the archway entrance and it’s got the kind of some unique aspects to it that um are typically Japanese elements that you’ve got one side that’s larger than the other and you would open it for Sunrise or sunset or you’d open it the other way although Wells wanted the garden to have a Japanese influence he insisted it included a South Carolina element the South Carolina element that Ferman Wells did add to it of having the bald cypresses um in there and then there’s also some palet um saw palet so you would never see those in a traditional Japanese garden but that’s our little South Carolina twist Renovations were complete by June of 2022 and since the park has many visitors and according to Colin even some small intimate weddings reporting from Newberry Cy buer news9 W LTX