10 Facts About Taki Handa

Taki Handa was a Japanese horticulturist, best known for designing and directing the construction of a Japanese garden in Scotland in 1908.

Taki Handa's father was a prison guard who mended umbrellas; her older brother Handa Hisao was a military physician and helped support the family.

Taki Handa 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.

Taki Handa attended Doshisha Women's College in Kyoto, and Mary Florence Denton, an American faculty member there, encouraged Handa to seek further studies abroad.

Taki Handa attended Studley College in England from 1906 to 1908.

In 1908, while living in Britain, Taki 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.

On her return to Japan, Taki Handa taught botany, horticulture and English at Doshisha Women's College in Kyoto.

Taki Handa 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.

Taki Handa married in 1910, to Seiichi Nakanome, a widowed physician with six children.

Taki Handa was widowed when her husband died in 1938; she died in 1956, in her mid-eighties.