10 Real World Star Trek Locations You Can Visit

As the L.A. City Sanitation website puts it, "The [Japanese] garden is irrigated with effluent from Tillman, and the 2.75-acre lake is filled with the plant's treated water". Oddly, that somehow feels like the most Star Trek thing anyone could ever say. It only makes sense, after all, for (the principal exterior filming site of) Starfleet Headquarters and Academy to be sustainable.

The Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in San Fernando Valley, California, began operation in 1985, and the Japanese Garden that lies next to it, designed by Doctor Koichi Kawana and dedicated in 1984, was indeed conceived to extol the virtues of reclaimed water. The Garden is open and free to the public, although reservations are limited to narrow windows from Monday to Thursday, so you might want to plan your cosplay accordingly.

In fact, the first use of the Japanese Garden in Star Trek was for the practically pornographic ("And I welcome this huge one") Edo introductory scenes on Rubicon III in The Next Generation episode Justice. The Garden didn't appear as the grounds of Starfleet Academy until The First Duty, and a shot from that episode was re-used at the start of Time's Arrow (Part I). In Deep Space Nine's Homefront and Paradise Lost, the Japanese Garden became Starfleet Headquarters, and Voyager's Time and Again featured the Reclamation Plant itself. Then, it was back to the Garden as Starfleet Headquarters (sorta) for In The Flesh.