Garden Museum Hiei

Highlight

A café with a view of both Kyoto and Lake Biwa that can be enjoyed from terrace seats while partaking in light refreshments or meals.

A mountaintop garden influenced by the impressionists

Set on a mountaintop with a view of Kyoto on one side and Lake Biwa on the other, this garden-art museum is home to six gardens with a feel of the hills of Provence in Southern France in an aromatic garden, a rose garden and a lily pond one and a flower one landscaped like the garden at Monet’s home. The grounds are planted with some 100,000 flowers of 1,500 types to keep the gardens in bloom throughout the seasons.
Other major attractions of the museum are ceramic tile reproductions of 12 impressionist masterpieces, including Monet, Van Gogh, Degas, Manet, Renoir, Seurat, Pizarro and Cezanne. A joy of visiting the museum is to compare how well the gardens imitate the landscapes in the paintings.
The museum also has a café, modeled on a Paris street-corner one, and a shop offering museum goods, gardening goods as well as an impressionists’ guidance corner.