Like to see what your municipal tax dollars could accomplish? This urban Japanese garden is unlike anything you’ve ever seen at a water reclamation plant.

We were in Los Angeles this past fall, visiting our daughter. It’s a funny place — so sprawling, so diverse, so many things to see and experience. So imagine our surprise when our daughter said, “hey, go to the water reclamation plant!”

Known as the “Garden of Water and Fragrance,” this exclusive Japanese garden is located next to the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys, California. Nested literally amongst the typically LA collection of old strip malls, small residential neighborhoods, funky shops and restaurants, light industrial, and new condos, you’d never, ever know this place existed if you drove down Balboa Boulevard.

The idea for the garden started with the city engineer, Donald Tillman, whom the plant was named for. Built in the early 1980s by Dr. Koichi Kawana, a renowned landscape designer, and professor of Japanese design at UCLA, it’s well worth taking a long afternoon to wander around.

Enchanting waterfalls, trees of every shape, size, and configuration, winding pathways, and plenty of places to stop and contemplate meditate, or just wonder at the incredible sights you are experiencing await. There’s a large aristocratic Shoin building that seems to serve as an event space. A Shoin was a type of audience hall meant to be a study or drawing room.

There is a working teahouse and tea garden (staffed by volunteers on the weekend), a neat zig-zag bridge over an iris pond, and four types of traditional Japanese stone lantern, all hand-carved by artisans in Japan.

You’ll see plenty of wildlife, mostly birds, including the American Coot, with their squatty look and funny honking calls, egrets, and various species of ducks.

The administration building starred in a number of Hollywood productions, perhaps most famously as Star Trek’s Starfleet Academy. The gate to the garden was the one where the Karate Kid’s Miyagi told Daniel to paint. And the back wall of the facility was featured in the movie, Escape from New York.

The garden has a small entrance fee and there is a bookstore/souvenir shop. Be sure to ask the attendants there about their favorite places in the garden — each one seems to have something different they favor. Parking can be pretty tight, so leave the RV elsewhere and be patient.