Rikugi-en has been counted as one of the two excellent gardens of the Edo period together with Koishikawa Koraku-en. The land of Rikugi-en was given by the fifth shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi to his grand chamberlain Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu. Construction of this Kaiyu style landscape garden, which commenced in 1695, continued for more than seven years. Water from the Senkawa-josui Canal, whose primary purpose was for drinking, was lead to the garden. The pond was dug on the level plateau and miniature mountains were also created. A stream flows around the mountains. The water source to the pond now depends primarily on rain and underground water.
Reflecting Yoshiyasu's intimacy with literature, Rikugi-en became a sensitive and mild Japanese garden based on the taste of waka poems. Its name came from the "six elements of waka poems" that had been derived from "six styles of poems" written in an old Chinese poetry book "Mao-shi": "Foo"(folkish poems), "Fu"(direct expressions of thoughts), "Hi"(allegorical figurations), "Ko"(expressions of thoughts from outsights), "Ga"(poems chanted in palace), and "Sho"(ancestral poetical expressions). In this garden, the big pond with a towhead is surrounded by trees, imitations of Japanese beauty spots portrayed in Manyo-shu and Koki Wakashu such as Wakanoura in Kinki district(present Wakayama Prefecture) were developed, and 88 of them named after those beauty spots.
The garden became the property of Mitsubishi Iwasaki family in the Meiji period and was contributed to Tokyo city and opened to the public in 1938. In addition, it was appointed as special beauty spot of Japan in March 31, 1953.