Japanese Park in pune?

Question

Where is the Pune-Okayama Park located in Pune? And if someone could give me directions to it from Pune Rly Station, then that'd be really nice.

Thanks

Answer 1

Coconutty... can't stop laughing at your answer lol.... lol....  lol....  lol....  lol....  lol....

Such a lengthy answer but no relevant information for the questioner.

lol....  lol....  lol....  You could have included the history of Pune or even Maharashtra and then India too.... Then it would have been even a better answer no? Great...

lol.... lol....  lol....  lol....  lol....  lol....

Answer 2

Pune Okayama Friendship Garden or the Japanese Garden or the Pu la Deshpande Garden is on Sinhgad Road near MSEB colony and Ramakrishna Mutt Polutechnic. Distance from Railway Station is about 9-10 Km.

I'd suggest you take auto from outside the railway station.

Since you asked, following are the directions:

1. Start from Pune Railway Station and head South West on Ahmed Nagar Highway towards Sangam Bridge.

2. Before Sangam Bridge, you'll come to a roundabout (about 1.75 Km from Rly Station). At this round-about go left and at the next signal (about 250m from the round about) turn on Veer Samtaji Ghorpade Road (Juna Bazar Rd).

3. After about half a km, take the Kumbharwada Bridge (Dengate Bridge) and bear left on Congress House Road. Go about 1-Km.

4. Turn left on Jangli Maharaj Road. You'll pass Sambhaji Park and then Deccan Bus Depot (on your left) and after about 1-Km you'll reach Deccan Gymkhana Crossing.

5. Turn right on Maharashi Karve Marg (Karve Rd) and go about 1.5 km.

6. Then turn left towards Mahatre Bridge/Anant Kanhere Path and go about 0.5 - 0.75 Km and turn right on Budrukh Road before Mahatre Bridge. There is a Sewage treatment plant at the corner.

7. Go about 2 Km and turn left (near Vithoba park) towrads Rajaram Bridge. Cross the bridge and turn left on Sinhgad Road. Go about 0.5 Km and you'll see Japanese garden on your right after MSEB Office.

It can take more than 30-45 minutes due to traffic.

Answer 3

Pune -Okayama park is on Sinhagad Road. From railway station one can take a rickshaw and ask the driver to head to Sinhgad Road.  While coming from Pune city it is on the left hand side. It is also known as Pu La Deshpande Garden. Rikshaw wala will better know this name rather than Okayama Park.

Answer 4

The following article from India Times answers your 'location' question. For travel, you can ask an auto/taxi to take you to the Japanese Garden on Sinhad Rd. You can also check distances on mapsofindia or other maps/googleearth etc. sources.

Thank you for directing me to this article -- a great addition to the the landscape combining Japanese horticulture with native Indian evergreens !

Pune-Okayama Park, aka --  Pu La Despande Park

It took two years to realise this simplistic, yet spectacular, garden spread over 10 acres of land in the Pu La Deshpande Park on Sinhgad Road.

The Pune - Okayama Friendship Garden, as it is called, proved to be a great challenge for the Pune-based architect and landscape designers Shobha Bhopatkar and Mahesh Nampurkar, who worked with the Chief Garden Superintendent, PMC, Yeshwant Khaire.

While the idea came from the former commissioner Sanjay Kumar and the Association of Friends president Sameer Khale, this garden was a collaborative effort of the Japanese landscape company Shimoden Landscape and Civil Engineering, Shobha Bhopatkar and the PMC.

“Although the stone laying was done almost a year ago, the real work began to shape up only in the last six to eight months,” informs Khaire. “Owing to the monsoons we really couldn’t work out the details of this huge and prestigious project. This garden was to be a replica of the Japan’s well-known Korakuen Garden, which has a 300-year-old history.

The architects, landscape designers and the PMC along with their Japanese counterparts Takeshi Matsumoto, Shimezu san and Fujiwara san worked closely to create a beautiful and pleasingto-the-eye garden out of nothingness ; this was practically a lowlying marshy land.

“We had this land with us and even in the initial proposal of the Pu La Deshpande garden, there is a mention of creating a Japanese garden, following his life and travels to the City of the Rising Sun. It was a coincidence that the Japanese team from Shimoden liked this area after scouting the city for several other areas,” adds Khaire.

The biggest obstacle, as it turned out, was the language barrier . Mahesh Nampurkar, however , says that the initial hiccups were soon settled and they found a language through the sketches.

The Japanese selected this site because the surroundings of the hills and the green foliage served as the ideal backdrop, blending in perfectly with the Japanese belief in simple, but intricate and beautiful design.

Shobha and Mahesh, along with Khaire, visited Okayama and saw two famous gardens, Korakuen and Himeji garden. “We were looking at the technicalities of handling and executing the designs and technical details that the Japanese had asked for,” says Khaire. “Besides this, we were also considering whether creating this huge garden in a Japanese style was practically possible.”

Khaire also remarks that the Japanese ideology and attitude to work is very different. “When we began practically executing the design,” he says, “we gave the solid team of 400 plus an audiovisual idea of what we had to create . We decided to create a combination of Japanese designs with Indian ones.”

The team faced several challenges , such as having to create artificial mounds. For this, Khaire’s team used more than 30,000 truckloads of soil to raise the levels. Stone etchings, boulders of a certain kind and cut, rough granites, typical Japanese sit-outs - everything needed to go according to the Japanese designs and it took great skill for the landscape designers to execute and create it accordingly.

“We faced a problem when it came to the selection of plants. The Japanese team was looking for evergreen plants that would be easy to maintain and prune into shapes. They scouted around, and saw many nurseries and then decided upon Indian plants like Bakul, Putranjeeva, Bamboo shoots, filicum , Khaya and Mango trees,” explain both Nampurkar and Khaire.

“The characteristics of this garden involve a composition of fire, harmony, line, spirit world and water. Thus this garden expresses the various elements of light and darkness, softness and hardness , stillness and motion and warm and cold,” says Nampurkar.

The garden has simple lines and recreates the spirit of Zen philosophy.

“This garden is a perfect bridge between the two cities, encouraging culture, tradition and friendship,” concludes Khaire.

The garden opened to the public on February 1, 2006.