Yuushien Garden

Daikonshima is a small volcanic island in Lake Nakaumi, joined to the shore by a causeway, and it grows peonies. Most of the peony seedlings sold in Japan come from here, an industry built on volcanic soil that suits the plant, and Yuushien is where that industry put its garden.

The layout is a conventional circuit garden, a pond with pine-covered islets, waterfalls and tea houses, done properly and worth an hour on its own. What sets it apart is what the gardeners do with cut blooms. In spring, thousands of peony heads are floated across the pond in a single dense carpet of colour, and the effect is somewhere between a garden and an installation. In autumn the same treatment is given to dahlias.

For anyone arriving outside the season, an indoor peony hall keeps blooms at their peak all year round using controlled temperature, so the flower is available in February as well as May.

Daikonshima also grows Korean ginseng, one of very few places in Japan that does, and the garden shop sells it alongside peony products, which is an unusual pairing until you learn that both grew out of the same volcanic soil and the same local determination to farm something valuable on a small island.

Seasonal illuminations run in autumn and winter and are worth timing for.

Give it one to two hours. The Adachi Museum of Art, whose garden has been ranked the best in Japan by a specialist American journal every year since 2003, is twenty-five minutes away by car, and the two together make a strong day out of Matsue.