Moon Viewing Tea and Ikebana Exhibition
“Let’s enjoy the Autumnal Full Moon with flowers, tea, and music!”
Saturday, November 1, 2025
Time: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Location: Anderson Japanese Gardens – Visitors Center
Guests are required to meet at the visitor center by 5:45 PM.
$40.00 for Garden members | $45.00 for non-members
The Tsukimi (Moon-Viewing)
Join us for an evening of Ikebana and moon viewing. The AJG Ikebana group will display an exhibition of Ikebana.
Reiko Takahashi, an Ikenobo Ikebana instructor, will create “Tatehana”, the oldest style of the Ikenobo Ikebana School, as an offering to the Moon. Following this, Kimiko Gunji, Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, will perform the Kencha tea ceremony, serving a bowl of tea to the moon.
Tea and special sweets will be served to all participants.
You can enjoy a Shakuhachi performance by Omar Francis while viewing the moon.
Professor Gunji has been a regular presenter and lecturer for the Anderson Japanese Garden since 2012. She has given season-by-season tea ceremony demonstrations, various Japanese art-related workshops such as wagashi (Japanese sweet) making, kimono dressing, and Japanese cooking. She conducted with Tim Gruner, AJG garden curator, a special weekend seminar, Kokoro and the Gardener: Health for Spirit, Body and Community in the summer of 2019 at AJG. In 2023 & 2024, she was invited to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin to lead a Kokoro seminar and will return there this summer for another session.
She initiated the Anderson Japanese Garden Summer Festival in 2014 and established the tea study group in 2015. Her mission has been to introduce Japanese aesthetics and the tea spirit to the public, helping to promote a better understanding among all of us and making this world a better place to live.
The Anderson Japanese Gardens Tea Study Group
The Anderson Gardens Tea Study group is a group of individuals interested in learning more about Chado – The Japanese way of Tea. We follow the Urasenke School of Chado under the leadership of Kimiko Gunji, Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
