On the drum bridge in San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden, the wooden arch rises so steeply that you climb it almost like a ladder, one hand on the rail, as the pond opens up beneath you. From the top you can see the stone lanterns and the pagoda through the trees, and by the time you’ve stepped down the other side, the city you walked in from already feels a long way off.

Japan’s garden traditions, closer to home

A trip to Japan is wonderful when the time and the long flight both work, and when they don’t, California has a gentler version waiting. Some of the earliest Japanese gardens in the United States were built here, and two of them are close enough to share a long weekend, which gives you the same rhythm of slow walking and long looking that makes a garden trip so restoring.

Start in Golden Gate Park

The Japanese Tea Garden was created for the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894 and is recognized as the first public Japanese garden in the United States. Go in the morning when the gates open, walk the paths slowly, and then settle into the tea house with a pot of sencha while the garden fills in around you. If your weekend falls in March or April, the cherry trees will be in bloom along the paths.

Then south to the hills above Saratoga

An easy drive south brings you to Hakone Estate and Gardens, where Oliver and Isabel Stine bought land for a summer retreat in 1915 and Isabel brought in architect Tsunematsu Shintani and landscape architect Naoharu Aihara two years later. The National Park Service describes it as the oldest Japanese-style country villa in the Western Hemisphere, and the City of Saratoga has owned it since 1966, when the city bought it to keep the land from being subdivided. Its gardens climb a wooded hillside around a pond and a moon bridge, with a wisteria arbor and a quiet zen garden to sit beside, and it’s the kind of place where an hour on a bench passes without you noticing.

If you’re closer to Los Angeles or San Diego

Southern California has its own version of this weekend. Henry Huntington laid out the Japanese Garden at The Huntington in San Marino between 1911 and 1912, and you can still walk over its moon bridge and past a house that was built in Japan and shipped to California. Farther south, the Japanese Friendship Garden in San Diego’s Balboa Park is called Sankei-en, the Three Views Garden, because its path around the pond is designed to give you three distinct views as you walk.

Shaping a slow weekend around you

Every woman’s version of this weekend looks a little different, and shaping it around what you love is the best part of planning it. Some women like settling into one place so there’s only one unpack, while others would rather spend a night near each garden and wake up close to the gate. You might give each garden its own unhurried morning, or see both in one easy day and keep the rest of the weekend for a long lunch and a slow soak. Whichever shape you choose, the gardens reward the same gentle pace, with paths that wind around the water and a new view opening every few steps, and that unhurried feeling is what I aim for in every restorative trip I plan for women in midlife and menopause.

What the research says about slow time among trees

Japan has a name for this kind of unhurried time in nature, shinrin-yoku, which translates as forest bathing. A 2019 systematic review in Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine looked at 28 studies and concluded that forest bathing may improve both physical and psychological health, including measures of heart and blood vessel function and symptoms of anxiety and depression. The authors noted that study quality varied and called for more rigorous research, so the findings are promising rather than settled, and because the studies weren’t focused on women in midlife, they’re best read as a general signal. A garden is also a smaller setting than the forests in those studies, which limits the comparison, though the invitation to slow down among the trees is much the same.

A weekend like this is something you do entirely for yourself, close to home, with nowhere you have to rush to and plenty of green to sit in.