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Japanese gardens (Kanji 日本庭園, nihon teien), i.e. gardens in traditional Japanese style, can be found at private homes, in neighborhood or city parks, at Buddhist temples or Shinto shrines, and at historical landmarks such as old castles. Many of the Japanese gardens most famous in the West, and within Japan as well, are dry gardens or rock gardens, karesansui. The tradition of the Tea masters has produced highly refined Japanese gardens of quite another style, evoking rural simplicity. In Japanese culture, garden-making is a high art, intimately related to the linked arts of calligraphy and ink painting. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Japanese gardens have also been imitated in Western gardening.
The tradition of Japanese gardening was passed down from sensei to apprentice, in a rigorous apprenticeship that has remained unbroken since the fifteenth century. The opening words of Zōen's Illustrations for designing mountain, water and hillside field landscapes (1466) are "If you have not received the oral transmissions, you must not make gardens" and its closing admonition is "You must never show this writing to outsiders. You must keep it secret".
A catalogue of features "typical" of the Japanese garden may be drawn up without inquiring deeply into the aesthetic underlying Japanese practice. Typical Japanese gardens contain several of these elements:
* Water, real or symbolic.
* Rocks
* An island fashioned in a manmade pond, thought to have been an innovation modelled on Chinese practice, that was introduced by the powerful court dignitary Soga no Umako, about 620 CE.
* A bridge to the island, or stepping stones.
* A lantern, typically of stone.
* A teahouse or pavilion.
* A surrounding wall of traditional character.
* A "borrowed landscape" from beyond the garden's confines.
Japanese gardens might fall into one of these styles:
* Pond gardens, for viewing from a boat.
* Sitting gardens, for viewing from inside a building or on a veranda.
* Tea gardens, for viewing from a path which leads to a tea ceremony hut.
* Stroll gardens, for viewing a sequence of effects from a path which circumnavigates the garden. The seveneenth-century Katsura garden in Kyoto is a famous exemplar.
The karesansui (or karesenzui, kosansui, kosensui 枯山水: "dry landscape") style originate from zen temples. These have no water and few plants, but typically evoke a feeling of water using pebbles and meticulously raked gravel or sand. Rocks chosen for their intriguing shapes and patterns, mosses, and low shrubs typify the karesansui style. The gardens at Ryōan-ji, a temple in Kyoto, and Daisen-in, created in 1513, are particularly renowned.
Other gardens also use similar rocks for decoration. Some of these come from distant parts of Japan. In addition, bamboos and related plants, evergreens including Japanese black pine, and such deciduous trees as maples grow above a carpet of ferns and mosses.
Shakkei (借景), "borrowed scenery," is a technique used to integrate the garden with mountains, buildings, or other objects outside its boundaries. A middleground element, often carefully maintained plantings, blocks unwanted elements and frames the desired view. This middleground integrates the "borrowed" view into the garden's design. The viewer is encouraged to see all three areas - foreground, middleground, and background - as a single garden. Wikipedia |
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