Authentic Japanese Gardens

Creating Japanese Design and Detail in the Western Garden

Yoko Kawaguchi

• Editore: IMM Lifestyle Books
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781607651819
• Argomento: Ciencias biológicas
• Categoria: Horticultura

Discover how to recreate Japanese garden design and detail in either urban or country settings, with practical advice and stunning color photography.

An unpainted, ornamental bridge is well suited to a woodland setting. At the same time, well-groomed evergreen shrubs and azaleas provide the touch of formality a bridge of this type requires. Middle-sized pines, enkianthuses, and taller evergreen shrubs can be arranged together with ground-hugging junipers next to water. Conifers such as Taxus cuspidata and Juniperus chinensis have many dwarf forms that can be used in these situations. Prune the trees and shrubs carefully to keep their overall shape.

The earliest descriptions of gardens in Japan are found in seventh-century poems. From them it is possible to see that lakes and islands and bridges were already the principal features of the aristocratic gardens of that period. Picturesque rocky shorelines were also being created to add variety to the landscape.

Right from the beginning, Japanese gardens were the products of a highly self-conscious culture that tried to recreate naturalistic landscapes near people’s houses, but also to find pleasure in reminders of Nature’s rugged and untamed wilderness.

THE HILL AND POND GARDEN

The choice of landscapes to reproduce was closely connected with how people saw their country. By building islands in the middle of lakes they were confirming their identity as an island people. Gardens of this kind came to play an even greater role in aristocratic life once the imperial court was moved to Kyoto at the end of the eighth century. As this area was blessed with many springs, as well as being watered by several clear rivers issuing from the richly forested mountain ranges surrounding the city to the north, east and west of the broad valley floor, it is hardly surprising that lakes became more significant in gardens than ever before. About the time the first imperial palace in Kyoto was being constructed, a garden was built around a sacred spring just south of the palace grounds. This garden eventually included a large lake with a sacred island, overlooked by another palace. Later aristocratic gardens in Kyoto were modelled on this imperial prototype.

A vermilion gateway forms a brilliant contrast to the deep blue Californian sky. Sequoias are combined with traditionally pruned pines in this San Francisco garden. The short trees and shrubs planted down the incline are neatly pruned, helping to create an impression of dense planting. A low embankment in a more informal garden can be planted with a single variety of a weeping bush such as Japanese bush clover (species of Lespedeza) which produces tiny purple-pink, pea-like blossoms in autumn.

For the next four centuries, a highly sophisticated culture flourished in these garden palaces. This society gave birth, for example, to The Tale of Genji, a portrait of the life of refined and sensitive emotions led by the nobility. The author, Lady Murasaki Shikibu, lived at the end of the tenth century and the beginning of the eleventh. The exquisite feelings she described include responses to the natural world, though these reactions are kept within the conventions of the time. The court revolved around a strict calendar of elaborate rituals and splendid ceremonies, and it made great formal occasions of excursions to outlying hills in the autumn. There the nobility amused themselves by picking wild flowers which they then replanted in their gardens at home. Pilgrimages to more distant temples also provided rare opportunities for these aristocrats to leave the confines of the city. Along the way they were able to catch glimpses of white beaches, wind-tossed pines and the sea itself. These were the landscapes they wanted to have re-created for them in paintings and in their gardens.

A weeping willow is carefully positioned over a pond so that it casts its reflection in the water. Japanese maples are also often used in this way.

A typical palace faced south and looked out on an open expanse of sand, a ritual space, beyond which might be some scattered planting, and then a large lake fed by a channel which was dug so that it ran into the garden from one corner of the estate, passing under several corridors of the palace on its way. This stream was embellished with rocks to simulate a rippling brook, and around it the terrain was made to undulate gently. Here, the clumps of wild flowers gathered in the hills were replanted: balloon flowers, hostas, yellow valerian and bush clover. The nobility of Kyoto loved gentle, sloping mountains like the ones nearby. There were also older memories of the perfectly shaped, dome-like mountains around the older capitals of Nara and Asuka – mountains immortalized in some of the oldest poetry in Japan. These ‘feminine’ mountains are quite unlike the precipitous, craggy, dangerous mountains lying further to the east. After the opening of Japan to the West in the nineteenth century, these were called the Japan Alps.

These standing stones surrounded by a birch forest carpeted with soft moss look ancient. Japanese gardens strive to attain this timeless quality but it does take patience to achieve it. There is certainly quiet enjoyment to be savoured in planning how a garden will look to future generations.

The white, sparkling beaches that once surrounded the Bay of Osaka were copied in these grand gardens. For the sake of contrast, rocky shorelines were often built to represent Nature’s wilder aspects. The lake would have up to three islands, all connected with bridges. During courtly entertainments, these islands provided an ideal stage for musicians, who also performed from gilded and painted boats. Guests would admire them from the palace verandah as they caught sight of them between the pine-trees. They would listen as the music wafted closer, then became more distant as the boats floated away. Another room from which the garden could be seen was an open one built directly over the lake and connected to the rest of the house by a long corridor. From here, or from a separate pier, elegant princes and their ladies were able to go out on the cool lake on fierce summer days.

Temple and palace gardens

Sadly, none of these palace gardens has survived the centuries in anything like their original shape, but there are other lake gardens in the grounds of Buddhist temples. As they were intended to evoke an idea of the paradise Buddha was thought to inhabit, they are referred to as paradise gardens. In these gardens, the main hall of the temple is built facing the lake. From this hall, the statue of Buddha gazes serenely over his tranquil domain where the sacred lotus flowers bloom.

In the twelfth century, political power began to shift to the warrior classes. Architectural fashions began to evolve too, reflecting the provincial, even rural background of many of the new warlords. Some of the most powerful of them became Buddhist monks in later life, and this meant that features taken from monastic buildings were also used in many of the villas and retreats they commissioned. Many gardens lost the open ritual space of swept sand that formerly divided the house from the lake. Rocks gradually began to be more prominent in the landscape. Lonely outcrops of stone appeared in the middle of garden lakes, and they were increasingly identified with sacred mountains in Buddhist and Chinese mythology. Paths were planned to allow these gardens to be seen from different directions, and the stroll garden came into being.

Water, buildings, rocks, moss, trees, shrubs: all had their part to play in creating the complex effect of these gardens. With the development of the tea garden in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, new influences were swiftly absorbed into the design of stroll gardens, and what was intimate and modest in the tea garden became grand and ambitious. It was around that time that the famous imperial gardens belonging to the Katsura and Shugakuin Palaces near Kyoto were built. At Katsura, stepping stones, paths and bridges meander among five large and small islands. In one place, a pebbly spit of land juts out into the lake, its point adorned with a single round stone lantern standing on an outcrop of rock like a miniature lighthouse. This headland was thought to represent a celebrated landscape on the coast of the Sea of Japan, known as the Bridge to Heaven. The route around the garden at Katsura dips into shady glens and rises again to a fanciful mountain pass, where there is a humble building like a mountain inn. As well as holding several landscapes in miniature, Katsura is also a tea garden, leading guests up to any one of the seven tea houses within the grounds. There are the usual features of a well-appointed tea garden: roofed benches for meeting people, stone lanterns along the pathways, and basins of water for washing hands. The palace complex itself stands imposingly in the middle of an open expanse of lawn. With its clean, strong lines and austere simplicity, it forms another dramatic feature of the garden.

For the next two centuries, following this high point in the history of gardens in Japan, the stroll garden remained the status symbol of the highest-ranking noblemen in the country and a significant drain on their purses. The construction of elaborate stroll gardens was expected of a feudal lord as an indication of his peaceful intentions. It was another way for the overlord of the whole country, the shogun in Edo (Tokyo), to make sure his vassals’ finances were so thoroughly drained that they would never have enough spare money to organize a successful revolt. However, the tradition stagnated and became rigidly formulaic, until the entire culture of the warrior class collapsed when Japan was finally forced to open her doors to the western world in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Manmade hills

In the West, gardeners often go to a great deal of trouble to level the ground for a smooth lawn. In Japan, manuals teach how to add contours to flat land to give added depth and perspective to a garden. If a pond or a small lake is being made, the earth removed during its construction is ideally suited for building small mounds, hills or knolls to produce a gently undulating landscape.

Azaleas and Iris ensata in bloom together in the East Garden of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The irises here are planted in marshy ground and their informal drifts form a pleasing contrast with the pruned azaleas.

Japanese gardens tend not to be densely planted, and the gardens of Kyoto had expanses of open ground. The idea is not to cover the entire mound with...