Designing a Japanese Garden

The beauty of Japanese gardens is clear and it is equally clear why someone should want to design a Japanese garden for their home. However, if done incorrectly, 'Japanese' gardens can be easily ruined. Here we present some useful advice.

It should be obvious to even the casual eye that Japanese garderns are vastly different from Western ones. Traditionally, our gardens have been celebrated for their formal beauty; their careful geometrjes celebrating the rational precision of their makers. Conversley, the rhythms and patterns of Japanese gardens reproduce and symbolise the landscape of Japan and are established in a way to hide the human hand behind them.  

To achieve this effect, garden stones and trees are laid out asymmetrically to suggest the rugged wildness of nature. Permament greens, grays, and browns predominate, but they are counterpointed by scattered flowers and fruits that mark time's passage with cycles of change. Empty space, wind, periods of dormancy, shadows, and viewing angles are subtler but full-function design elements that deepen the garden's relationship to it's site. Abstract renderings of moving water in solid stone and gravel provoke the mind with their union of seeming opposites. Such dense interplays produce the effect of seeing nature whole, even though the garden may take up no more than a corner of a yard and consist only of bamboo, a shrub, and a stone.

 These two images (above and right) show a Japanese Tea Garden. The stones, particularly the central one linking the paths, are weighty in feeling but low plantings provide needed balance to make the garden comfortable to view. The yukimi-gata lantern is framed by Japanese cypress, little leaf box, and camellia. The bench by the entryway is where guests would wait, prior to a tea ceremony.

Trees and water as seen as letting the garden open vertically and horizontally with growth and activity. The gardener lets evergreens predominate because they suggest the constancy and endurance of nature and keep the garden green all year round. But he will add a flowering tree or one whose leaves turn brilliantly in autumn to mark seasonal change and suggest the cyclic process of all life.  When he shapes trees and shrubs he does so to expose their natural character and habit, not to bend them to his will. Water is a free element, always in motion, captured only by the shape it adopts. The gardener uses it for sound. He counts its reflecting properties as a part of his design. He lets it fall, run, or gather in a pond. So important in fact is the idea of water to a garden that it will sometimes be represented by stone, gravel or sand, in a waterless version called kare sansui. Water will always be represented.

In the image to the right, running from the gate to the entryway in the rear, the L-shaped path is the main focus of this garden, and it is given plenty of room. In the rear is a little-leaf box. Note the almost mirror-like use of stone in front that brings the outside directly into the property.

Japanese gardens are great for creating a relaxing space for you to inhabit. They are calming and also assisst your creativity. Don't be afraid to chance on this interesting style: the individuality of the garden is always a benefit.






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