Insights of Japan and Japanese Gardens

As some of you already know I take a lot of my inspiration from Japanese gardens, and have had the good fortune to visit Japan on a number of occasions. I just returned from my most recent trip to Tokyo where I went looking for further influence on what I can apply in my own backyard.

What I am going to try to do in this post is talk about the things I observed, and the lessons I learnt in looking at Japanese gardens within Japan. 

The "Spirit" of Japan

Mount Fuji, symbol of Japan

The serenity of a Japanese landscape and the simple but deliberate structures of the Japanese gardens are what make the gardens unique. The two main principles incorporated in a Japanese garden are scaled reduction and symbolisation. In terms of symbolisation, there's no better place to start than Mount Fuji. Fujisan as it is called in Japanese is Japan's highest Mountain at 3,776 meters. It has long inspired awe and worship, as it was believed to be inhabited by deities, and is an object of faith for Japanese people and a place that their hearts draw support from. This is expressed by the official description as a Cultural World Heritage Site stating: 

"Fujisan, sacred place and source of artistic inspiration" 

I took this picture out the window of a speeding Shinkansen train heading down to Kyoto from Tokyo. Fujisan also inspires the principals around gardening in Japan by using it as artistic inspiration.

The garden is a three dimensional thing

Mysterious forest.

Looking through these trees you see these strange tangled shadows that peek through to a small wall and beyond. It has that mysterious haunted look. From the opposite sunny side (see Ground Cover below) they're just trees, but the path has been created in such a way that you can see two completely different vistas of the same garden. One side is a lush green patch of trees, the other is a mysterious spooky garden. 

We sometimes forget that a garden is essentially a three dimensional sculpture of plants, and that needs to be taken into consideration when planning. It's something that Japanese gardeners excel at.

Ground cover everywhere! 

Ground cover everywhere you look

You won't often see a blank patch of anything in a Japanese garden. Above you can see the extensive cover that was under those shadowed trees. It was some kind of bamboo related bramble that just took off everywhere. 

In fact I don't think I have ever seen any mulch (other than natural fallen leaves) purposely put anywhere in a Japanese garden. There's stones or gravel, or plants, or even manicured dirt that is daily swept to within an inch of its life. In the garden every inch seems devoted to having a plant of some kind that is perfectly suited to a purpose.

Think of the future of the garden, not just the present

A blend of all the elements

I was pondering this view above for quite a while, trying to fathom the thoughts of the original designer when this garden was planted. 

The configuration of this garden was completed in 1906, and although destroyed by air-raids during the war, it was rebuilt and reopened in 1949 to what stands today. The balance in symmetry is astounding to look at and is obviously well maintained to keep it looking that way. The vision of the original designers 110 years ago astounds me.

Everything is important

"Wow look at that fish!" "What fish?"

The materials used, the plants selected, the placement, the gravel type, the water, even the fish, all combine to make this a wonderful harmonious whole that is a Japanese garden. I think we can only hope to emulate this in some way. 

So when are you creating, you need to think where it's going and what it will look like later, not just now, and how it will look in balance with everything else. A hard ask.

Look beyond your borders at shakkei

I there is one thing I have really picked up in Japan it's that your garden doesn't stop at the back fence. Take a look at what's "over there" and incorporate it into the garden. If you look at the NTT Docomo Yoyogi Building in the background of the park, it looks like it is part of the park landscape as if it's always been there.

In Japanese gardening this is called "borrowed scenery" (借景; Japanese: shakkei) and is the principle of "incorporating background landscape into the composition of a garden" which is found in traditional East Asian garden design. 

The Japanese really take their aesthetics as far as they can go, so if you notice, the blinds in the building are drawn to match the shape of the building, completing the picture. Now that's what I call fussy!

Balance and harmony needs maintenance

Balance and Harmony in a Landscape

This tree has no doubt been trimmed to within an inch of it's life, as has all its surrounding brothers and sisters, in keeping with the principal of "scaled reduction". 

The lesson here is that if you want to keep everything looking beautiful and balanced, it requires maintenance to keep it that way. Think of the patience required to maintain a Japanese Bonsai tree, and then apply it to a whole garden.

Think big and make a statement, it's all in the perspective

Think BIG

Japanese gardening isn't only just about "scale reduction", it can also be about increasing the scale! When I saw this Japanese stone lantern (known as a tōrō or dai-dōrō specifically) the first thing that struck me was its size. It stands about 2m high and is roughly 1.5m in diameter, and stands on an island in the middle of a lake connected by two bridges. This thing is enormous, but as with anything it all depends on your perspective. 

If you are standing in front of the lantern it's monstrously big, however from across the lake it's the perfect size in relation to everything around it as you can see below. So remember perspectives when selecting plants or ornaments as you don't want things to disappear.

Remember your perspective

Framing the view

A gorgeous view

Take a look at these two pictures above and below. It might look like two different views but they were actually taken from the same location looking at the same garden, the difference is the frame in the bottom picture. I just took ten paces backwards and suddenly the view completely changes as the eye is drawn to specific highlights and views.

So I take away that it's a great idea to frame a view, after all sometimes you can't see the trees because of the forest!. Perhaps you don't need to build a pavilion like the one below, but I have seen plenty of examples of framing using internal windows to the house as an example, or even raising up a frame in the garden.

A framed view

Nothing is random, it's only the appearance of randomness

Beautiful natural scene or well planned garden?

Obviously a lot of thought goes into these gardens. This is Tamamo Ike pond, part of the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden in Tokyo. There's a philosophy that goes with Japanese gardening that is well outside of my shallow understanding, but the impact is striking, and I can only hope to achieve a similar effect by tinkering around the edges and what i can find on Google!.

According to Wikipedia Japanese gardens have their roots in the Japanese religion of Shinto, with its story of the creation of eight perfect islands, and of the shinchi, the lakes of the gods. In traditional gardens, the ponds and streams are carefully placed according to Buddhist geomancy, the art and science of putting things in the place most likely to attract good fortune.

The rules for the placement of water were laid out in the first manual of Japanese gardens, the Sakuteiki, or "The Creation of Gardens", in the 11th century. According to the Sakuteiki, the water should enter the garden from the east or southeast, and flow toward the west, because the east is the home of the Green Dragon (seiryu), an ancient Chinese divinity adapted in Japan, and the west is the home of the White Tiger, the divinity of the east. Water flowing from east to west will carry away evil, and the owner of the garden will be healthy and have a long life.

Also according to the Sakuteiki, another favorable arrangement is for the water to flow from north, which represents water in Buddhist cosmology, to the south, which represents fire, which are opposites (yin and yang), and therefore will bring good luck.

I wonder if my local council planning permits have space for all that?

Soften the hard landscaping

Soften the hard

I don't know if this was a deliberate act to fill the crevices in this wall with plants, or if it was a naturally occurring phenomenon, but the outcome was a terrific look that I think should be easily achievable. I have the great stone wall in my side garden and this effect would soften and integrate it nicely with some plants put into the cracks.

My only problem is watering them. I took this photo up in the mountains of Nikko National Park which is about 3 and 1/2 hours north of Tokyo by train. Up there it's always wet and moist with a lot of water flowing (hence the size of the guttering), but in Melbourne it's only like that in winter, so I'll have to give some thought to irrigating the wall somehow during the warm summer period, but this is definitely on my garden to-do list now.

Anything is possible

You can do a lot with a single tree

The picture above is of a purple Japanese Wisteria (wisteria floribunda) tree at the Ashikaga Flower Park north of Tokyo that I has the pleasure of visiting in May during the flowering season.

IT IS ONE SINGLE TREE! This is Japan’s largest wisteria plant and while certainly not the largest in the world, it still comes in at an impressive 1,990 square meters (or half an acre) and dates back to around 1870.  Although wisterias can look like trees, they’re actually vines. Because its vines have the potential to get very heavy, this plant’s entire structure is held up on steel supports, allowing visitors to walk below its canopy and bask in the pink and purple light cast by its beautiful hanging blossoms.

That is one tree that shows that really anything is possible.

What appears simple can be very complex

Simplicity belies complexity at Ryoan-ji

This was one of my favourite gardens in Japan, the zen garden at Ryoan-ji Temple. It looks simple on the surface, just some gravel and rocks, so it can't be that complex can it?

(courtesy of Wikipedia) The garden is a rectangle of 248 square meters, twenty-five meters by ten meters. Placed within it are fifteen stones of different sizes, carefully composed into five groups; one group of five stones, two groups of three, and two groups of two stones. The stones are surrounded by white gravel, which is carefully raked each day by the monks. The only vegetation in the garden is some moss around the stones. The garden is meant to be viewed from a seated position on the veranda of the hōjō, the residence of the abbot of the monastery.

I took the shot above from just to the left of the hōjō steps.

The stones are placed so that the entire composition cannot be seen at once from the veranda. They are also arranged so that when looking at the garden from any angle (other than from above) only fourteen of the boulders are visible at one time. It is traditionally said that only through attaining enlightenment would one be able to view the fifteenth boulder.

The wall behind the garden is an important element of the garden. It is made of clay, which has been stained by age with subtle brown and orange tones.

But even after centuries in existence no one has cracked the riddle of these seemingly random rock clusters that seem to float on the sea of gravel. It's been examined both philosophically and scientifically in enormous detail, with no single answer, and it continues to fascinate everyone who sees it, me included.

Now THAT is the essence of a great garden.

A beautiful garden is worth having

Even an average Japanese house can have a great garden

The thing that struck me most about the domestic gardens of Japan is the care and attention to detail given, no matter how small the space available. In some way it seems to be a national obsession. In my travels I saw some pretty average houses that had simply sensational gardens, and it seemed that in a lot of cases, even if there was only a postage stamp available to plant on, it would have some fabulously and meticulously sculpted tsuboniwa upon it.

Looking at the house above that I spotted while out walking in a small country north of Tokyo, the house itself isn't much to look at, but the garden was immaculate and well cared for, an obvious symbol of pride for the owner, as it should be for all of us.