It's always interesting to read press about Portland. This focuses on the Classical Chinese Garden, and the Japanese Garden, both full of detail that the casual browser will miss, and which the article briefly touches upon.

Like a good article, it incites the reader to action, and it makes me realize it's been a long time since I've been to either garden.

Everyone told me to come back in the rain when I first visited the Chinese Garden two days earlier during a rare burst of November sun, and they were right. All of the Portland gardens I saw in the course of a long weekend—Tanner Springs Park and Jamison Square, the new pocket parks in the trendy downtown Pearl District; the International Rose Test Garden perched high above the city in Washington Park; the display gardens of local specialty nurseries —looked lovely under low dripping skies. But the Chinese and Japanese gardens, the crown jewels of the City of Roses, were loveliest of all. Different as they are, these two Asian gardens both rely on pattern, structure and metaphor instead of the floral can-can of typical American gardens. Rain, especially the mild intermittent rain of the Pacific Northwest winter, is their varnish.