Aizu Matsudaira's Royal Garden

Aizu Matsudaira's Royal Garden (御薬園?) is a medicinal herb garden in the city of Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. The garden was first established in the 1380s. In the 1430s Ashina Morihisa, the 10th feudal lord of the Ashina clan, believing it to be a sacred place, kept the garden as a villa. In 1670, Matsudaira Masatsune, the second feudal lord of the Aizu fief, cultivated various herbs in the garden. Private citizens were encouraged to grow herbs as well, so the garden became known as Oyakuen, or "medicinal herb garden". Today there are about 400 kinds of medicinal herbs and trees cultivated in and around the garden. Meguro Jotei, a landscape gardener during the Edo period, designed the current layout of the garden to show nature in miniature, which is typical of a Japanese garden. The garden pond is named Shinji no Ike and is shaped like the kanji character for "heart" (心). The rectangular garden has a perimeter of about 540 m and an area of about 1.7 ha.