Fabyan garden will show off its winter splendor

If you tour Fabyan Japanese Garden in spring or summer, you may find irises, peonies or lilies in bloom; in the fall, anemone and sedum add their own sparks of color to a garden already ablaze with red maples.

But in wintertime?

In the winter, when decaying western-style gardens rest in peace, Fabyan is alive with a wild beauty all its own. In a sense, death never really comes to the traditional Japanese garden, where it's not really about the flowering plants anyway.

With a backbone of stone and evergreens, Japanese landscapers have long designed their gardens to be multiseasonal, especially catering to summer and winter.

"One of the things the Japanese say is that the garden blooms twice during the year," said Liz Safanda, executive director of Preservation Partners of the Fox Valley. "They refer to those little drops of snow on the evergreens and shrubs as blossoms."

Normally open from May to October, Fabyan Japanese Garden in Geneva will show off its winter splendor in three guided walking tours this month and next. The walks are hosted by PPFV, and there's only one stipulation.

There must be snow.

"The snow kind of sculpts things and puts it in relief," Safanda said. "It needs to be coldish and a little bit of snow on the ground. A lot is fine, too, because we'll shovel a path."

After a short introduction, the hourlong hike begins with hot tea in the Waiting Bench Chamber, a shelter inside the garden established by Col. George Fabyan on his family's showplace estate. Visitors can carry their tea to continue warming them up during the walk.

Visitors will tour the entire one-acre garden, viewing the traditional torii gate, the wooden fence cut to look like bamboo, the charming Moon Bridge, the large snow lanterns, the hill, the pond and the 100-year-old teahouse.

Docents will offer a little Fabyan family history and talk about design philosophy and elements of a typical Japanese garden as well as plantings that are used.

The trees at Fabyan include white pine, black pine and weeping spruce, and many shrubs also are evergreens, Safanda said, "so you still have greenery in the winter. (The Japanese) like how the layer of snow changes the look in the winter from the summer."

"It's really completely different in the winter," said Lynn Dransoff, director of Fabyan Villa and its Japanese garden, "because you're looking mostly at just the structure, whether it's hardscape or just the branches or limbs of the plants, and it's all highlighted by the snow."

The Japanese also appreciate the delicacy of snow frosting their buildings, concrete lanterns and stone, Safanda said. The pond is part of the winter wonderland, too, whether it's frozen or not. Safanda recalls a time in the garden when the sun was shining on the blue water, "and then you have the snow, and then the evergreens, and it was amazing."

One of her favorite experiences happened while she was leading a winter tour a couple of years ago. "It was the end of February, and it was kind of mild," Safanda recalls. "There was definitely snow on the ground. We came down the hill, and a great blue heron had just flown in. That was really surprising because they don't usually show up until April."

She said pawprints and wildlife are sometimes visible, and early spring flowers might even begin popping up in February.

"We can have a lot of surprises," she said. "It's not totally predictable what we're going to see."

Because of the vistas, Safanda said she especially enjoys leading groups up and down the large hill known as Mt. Sumeru. Dransoff said a "Mt. Sumeru" is a typical element in many Japanese gardens, representing the Buddhist center of the universe.

Her own favorite place in the garden is on the southwest side. "It's an area where there aren't a lot of plantings," Dransoff said. "It's called the Wedding Circle, and it's just a very nice view."

Safanda pointed out that the garden is much prettier today than when a Japanese landscape designer first laid it out in 1910.

"It looked interesting," she said, "but it didn't look as lovely as it does decades later because the plantings weren't mature."

Winter Walks at Fabyan Japanese Garden begin at the west gate at 1 p.m. Saturdays, Jan. 23 and Feb. 20, and Wednesday, Feb. 3. Admission is $2. Reservations are not required, but because snow is, visitors are asked to call (630) 377-6424 on tour mornings to confirm the event will take place.

Owned by the Forest Preserve District of Kane County, the century-old garden is located in the Fabyan West Forest Preserve on Route 31, just north of Fabyan Parkway in Geneva. For information, visit ppfv.org.