How to truly appreciate a Japanese garden

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This was published 2 years ago

How to truly appreciate a Japanese garden

By Brian Johnston
Classical Japanese garden design centres on six important attributes: seclusion, age, water, landscape views, space, and artificiality or human control.

Classical Japanese garden design centres on six important attributes: seclusion, age, water, landscape views, space, and artificiality or human control.Credit: iStock

Leave your Western expectations of gardens behind in Japan. You aren't going to sunbathe on a lawn, admire psychedelic flowerbeds or be impressed at displays of wealth and power. A Japanese garden is intimate and contemplative, an artwork rather than entertainment space. Prepare to philosophise rather than simply appreciate.

Classical gardens represent Japanese notions of elegance, simplicity and restrained beauty. As a result, they can seem monochrome (except in autumn), although that makes the occasional flowering of certain plants such as cherry trees particularly prized. Most plants have symbolic meanings such as purity (lotus), longevity (pine trees), honour (bamboo) and vitality (winter plum).

Classical garden design centres on six important attributes: seclusion, age, water, landscape views, space, and artificiality or human control. Expect more architecture than in a Western garden. Walls and walkways form individual "rooms" and provide an illusion of greater size. Windows frame particular views. Pavilions provide vantage points and resting places, and in former times housed libraries where scholars could work and be inspired.

There are various types of Japanese garden. Hill gardens (tsukiyama) are miniature landscapes often recreated from famous Chinese and Japanese poems or scroll paintings. They allow you to wander between mounds and ponds, often towards a hilltop pavilion that provides an overview. Hills gardens often cleverly blend into the background through use of "borrowed scenery" that provides a feeling of greater size.

Tea gardens (chaniwasui) are created for tea ceremonies. The outer garden is more clipped, the inner garden more natural-looking and approached on meandering pathways that represent a stroll into the mountains. This sense of journey and slow reveal is key to appreciating many types of Japanese garden.

Japan's most famous gardens are the dry gardens (karesansui) that feature well-placed stones on raked gravel. The design is influenced by Zen Buddhism and encourages meditation. Pause to contemplate the patterns of rocks, which might represent islands in an ocean, Buddha and his attendants, or a metaphorical journey on the river of life.

If you become pensive, a Japanese garden has served its purpose. The secret is to slow down. Mindfulness isn't a recent buzzword for the Japanese, it's a centuries-old habit. Take time to admire a peony blossom, maple bark, the daintiness of moss on stone. Think of a Japanese garden as a sanctuary in which to ponder life's meaning and beauty, and it will reward you.


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