"Sometimes just to touch the ground is enough for me," says Wakako Oe with all the warmth of her plenteous years, "even if not a single plant grows in the garden."
We are talking in the sunlight-filled porchlike area that she has designed off her rambling old house halfway between the valley floor and the mountain peaks of the southern Japan Alps. On all sides we are surrounded by her organic sculptures made from sheaves of grain, large tan gourds, hand-carved wooden puppet heads, bundles of millet, stalks of Japanese pampas grass, nests of twisted roots and seaweed. Many of these are attached to the bent bamboo struts of the semi-outdoor sitting area/tea room that she designed and built.
Outside, Oe's mint and thyme bushes blanket the ground and give off waves of fragrance when one runs one's hands across them.