MIREI SHIGEMORI: Modernizing the Japanese Garden, by Christian Tschumi, photographs by Markuz Wernli Saito. Stone Bridge Press, 128 pp., $18.95 (paper).

A revival of interest in the dry landscape garden of Japan both domestically and internationally took place during the early Showa Era (1926-1989), in which abstraction and symbolism once again came to the fore.

This was partly due to the fact that several new temple gardens were commissioned during this time, but also to the efforts of a number of prominent garden designers, among them Kinsaku Nakane and Takuma Tono.

Arguably, the foremost figure in the renaissance of the dry landscape garden was designer and garden historian Mirei Shigemori (1896-1971). Shigemori believed that by the middle of the Edo Period, as professionals took over their construction, much of the vitality had been leached from the Japanese garden, and that emulation and repetition had replaced innovation.