Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden

The experience

A 58-hectare former imperial estate ten minutes' walk east of Shinjuku Station, now run as a national garden by the Ministry of the Environment. It is divided into three distinct styles — a Japanese landscape garden with ponds and a teahouse, a symmetrical French formal garden, and an English landscape lawn — plus a large tropical greenhouse. Around 1,000 cherry trees of roughly 65 varieties bloom across the grounds.

The one central Tokyo green space big enough that the city genuinely drops away once you are inside it.

What a membership adds.

Everything above is free: the name, the photo, the rating, the exact spot. What members get is the part you can't Google: the sourced insider tip for this place (what to order, when to go, what to skip), every day of your trips unlocked in full with the insider tip on every researched stop, and the concierge at full strength, answering with your own insider tips, no daily meter.