If there’s one thing Japanese gardeners agree on, it is the admonition, “Never buy stones in the rain.” Even lumpen rocks that normally resemble gray concrete mounds, radiate a dark, lustrous energy and depth when soaked by the summer downpours.
Water has always been used to enhance the Japanese garden experience. A tradition still upheld in some quarters by those faithful to garden aesthetics, is to sprinkle stepping stones with water before a guest arrives. The large kutsu-nugi ishi (shoe-removing stone) at the entrances to some traditional private residences, will receive a similar treatment. Look at almost any small Japanese garden calendar, especially those featuring tsuboniwa (small courtyard gardens), and you will see that the photographers have made sure the ground cover is suitably damp and glistening, the stones freshly sprinkled.
Like the blossoming of cherry trees, the rainy season, known as tsuyu (literally the “plum rains”), does not occur simultaneously throughout the long chain of islands that constitute the Japanese archipelago.
The seasonal rain front, triggered by collisions of cold, high pressures streaming in from the Sea of Okhotsk and warmer high pressures coming from the Pacific, begins in May in subtropical Okinawa and follows a northerly trajectory, advancing through Honshu, before sputtering out in the Tohoku region in early July.
During the incessant rains, it may feel as if nature is being smothered, but, in fact, the opposite is true. Nourished by a steady flow of water, it is reasserting itself. Rice seeds are transplanted from nurseries to paddies during this season. Gardens go through a similar cycle of reinvigoration. Its long course, generating steamy air, overcast skies and lots of invasive mold, traces the geography of Japanese gardens.
But with soggy air, spongy grounds and inky skies, why would anyone want to visit a Japanese garden during the rainy season? Less vulnerable to decay and entropy than organic matter, rain — its capacity for transformation, its function in ponds and water lavers as mirrors reflecting the sky and clouds, and its immaterial forms as mist and vapor — has always appealed to Japanese garden designers. Invigorating and restorative, rain is enormously beneficial to gardens, bringing them truly to life by watering plants, replenishing ponds, waterfalls and streams, and adding a glint and brilliance to moss and greenery. High levels of precipitation in Japan are one reason there is so much tonal variety in the nation’s gardens.
There are even those who insist that the best time of year to visit a Japanese garden is during the rainy season.
According to Antonia Beattie, author of “Feng Shui Garden Design,” the sound of running water will help us feel relaxed, but can also “help clear negative energy from the garden as well as your life.”
As explained by garden scholar Marc Peter Keane, the neurological benefits and aesthetics of rain in a garden appear to have been lost on Heian Period (794-1185) courtiers, who applied the word “tsurezure,” signifying tedium and listlessness, to the season.
Japanologist and scholar Haruo Shirane has written on the encoded function of waka poetry at this time, how samidare, the early summer rains, were associated with ennui and melancholy, and a homophonic link existing between samidare and the word “midare,” meaning tangled or disturbed.
A descending depression is partly ascribed to the rains impeding the movement of nobility in their palaces, hobbling the opportunities for amorous encounters.
When the climate is sultry or oppressive, which it invariably is during the rainy season, water is a welcome refresher, not only for its cleansing and reinvigorating qualities, but also its auditory effects. Neuroscience suggests the sound of running water can evoke or unlock pleasant memories from the past.
With humidity levels high, the season’s seemingly interminable rain stimulates massive growth. You can almost feel a garden’s soaked roots expanding, leafage exulting in repeated drenches. After a downpour, the air remains humid but is tinged with the freshness of soaked earth and greenery. Leached or burned moss springs back to life, turning a luminous green. The smell of organic matter is invigorating. The growth of mold, lichen and moss at this time adds an antique patina to garden stones and ground cover. Greenery turns dark and reflective.
The Japanese have long held that water is the main life force in the natural world. In native Shintoism, it is revered for its purifying properties for both body and spirit. Instead of rocks or gravel, water provides the medium for contemplation, the attainment of quietude. In Buddhism, water, or its substitutes — sand and gravel in the dry landscape garden — is allegorical and allusive, a medium for the passage of life and the serenity of the afterworld.
Torrential downpours create temporary mayhem in the garden, but if it is designed in accord with geomantic principles, with streams and culverts flowing in a northeast to southwest direction on land blessed with good drainage, flooding will be avoided. The old Chinese gardening texts, liberally adopted by the Japanese, state that the north symbolizes water, the south fire. The north-south water flows, then, tracing the counter directional movement of yin and yang, will also douse a garden susceptible to fire.
For scholars, literati and followers of the finer points of culture, rainy season gardens are synonymous with certain nativist Japanese aesthetics. One of these is wabi-sabi, a refined concept fundamental to the appreciation of everything from gardens to pottery. The wabi part of the compound refers to aesthetics that find beauty and value in impoverished rusticity and simplicity, while sabi evokes a bleaker prospect of deterioration, aging and loneliness.
When the heavens opened in China, poets would gather under the shelter of pergolas and pavilions to listen to the sound of rainwater dripping from the eaves, a custom that Japanese aestheticians adopted, alongside practices like listening to the song of insects, distant temple bells or the wind blowing through pine trees.
Kusaridoi, or rain chains, produce another pleasing sound effect. A feature of both temple and private gardens, kusaridoi function as a vertical gutter, conveying water as it gushes off rooftops. Exposed for years to the elements, the chains, traditionally made of copper or iron, acquire an attractive patina as they age. As rain descends through a complex series of cups and chain links, an audible garden aesthetic emerges in the soothing sound of running water. Typically hung above a soak-away drain surrounded by gravel, or a stone slab, there is a hypnotic entrancement in watching rain coursing down the metal rungs. More enthralling than watching an overflow from a gutter, it equates to the drip and patter of rain hitting the leaves of a tree.
Atmospheric conditions have always been important to the poetry-driven culture of Kyoto. Mark Hovane, a longtime resident of the city, garden specialist and holder of a lively Instagram account — which focuses on Japan’s traditional, Buddhist-based microseasons — believes the season’s overcast skies add textual and color contrast to gardens.
“I secretly hope for a little bit of rain when I have guests,” he confesses, adding, “I explain that rain is a gift that brings out the very best of a Japanese garden in terms of nuanced atmosphere.” This includes the “physical ‘slowing down’ required to negotiate slippery stone pathways that leads to a deeper appreciation of the contemplative nature of Japanese landscaped space.”
Adding extra radiance to rainy season gardens are seasonal flowers, such as the kikyō (Japanese bellflower), yamayuri (golden-rayed lily), kishōbu (yellow flag) and the tsuyukusa (dayflower). Considered by many in the West to be an invasive weed, in Japan the dayflower, a “rainy season herb,” is looked upon favorably as an advance messenger of hope for a bountiful rice harvest.
There are countless spots throughout Japan for viewing hydrangeas, a flower closely linked with the rainy season. Meigetsuin — a temple in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture — is one of the best known. Also known as the ajisai-dera, or “hydrangea temple,” locals quip that Meigetsuin’s eponymous flower is at its best when the weather in Kamakura is at its worst: the humid, wet and overcast days of the rainy season.
The association between hydrangeas and the rainy season, and the custom of placing the flowering bushes in the grounds of temples, both infuses them with meaning and provides a picturesque setting that has become one of the classic images of Japan. The flowers, blooming in globular clusters sitting above ovate, spear-shaped leaves, change in color from green to blue, white and purple, the color influenced by the existence of aluminum in the moist earth where they are planted.
The rains act favorably on Japanese soil, which is largely acidic, resulting in hydrangeas that are naturally of an indigo hue. Artificially added limestone will alter the color to pink. Nitrogen will reverse it.
Thinking has it that irises, another prominent flower at their best during Japan’s “fifth season,” benefit wonderfully from a good drenching. Early examples of the flower can be traced to several parts of the country. A species known as kakitsubata (rabbit ear iris) is mentioned in the 10th-century “Tales of Ise,” an anthology of lyrical tales mixed with poems. Ariwara no Narihira, a character in one of the narratives, arriving in the district of Yatsuhashi (Eight Bridges), observes the flower growing in a wetland from the vantage point of eight bridges crisscrossing a marsh. The yatsuhashi motif is much repeated in the sets of eight raised boardwalks that often elevate visitors across iris gardens. Essentially a bog plant that thrives in shallow marshes, there is something theatrical about stepping onto the raised planks that zigzag through these damp, irrigated gardens.
Irises were first introduced to Edo (now Tokyo) by a farmer named Kodaka Izaemon in the 1660s, when he cultivated the flower in a marshy plot of land beside the Arakawa River in the village of Horikiri, now squarely within the urban sprawl of east Tokyo. Among the visitors to the Horikiri Shobuen garden was the great woodblock artist Utagawa Hiroshige, who would produce a fine work, “Horikiri no Hanashobu” (“The Horikiri Iris Garden”), the print appearing in his classic “One Hundred Views of Edo” series.
A lesser-known flower-viewing spot, right at the symbolic center of Tokyo, is the small but dazzling iris garden that forms a section of the Ninomaru Garden, part of the Imperial Palace grounds. The garden is attributed to the landscape designer and tea master Enshu Kobori, the essence of whose style is often described as “kirei sabi,” denoting simplicity and gracefulness.
Although he only created a handful of gardens in his life, the harmonic mastery of land and water here do suggest that, even if Enshu was not directly involved, his garden principles were closely heeded. Created in the style of the early 17th century stroll garden, its slightly raised banks and hillocks provide green perimeters that contrast highly effectively with the sunken field of blossoming flowers.
Better known than either Horikiri Shobu-en or Ninomaru is the secluded woodland iris garden at Meiji Shrine, located in the otherwise teeming Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. When Emperor Meiji died in 1912, a huge plot of land — 125 hectares in all — was set aside for the erection of a shrine dedicated to deifying his spirit and that of his consort, Empress Shoken.
Passing through its inner precincts, the sense of being in a forest in the city is enhanced by the presence of over 100,000 trees, many of them camphors and broadleaf evergreens. Listed as perennial herbs, the Japanese iris beds here run along the center of a shallow dale. The 1,500 flowers that grace this damp meadow are known as hanashōbu, an ornamental water iris, whose flat flowers are, typically, 20 centimeters in width, either single or double in their blossoms and appearing in shades of dark blue, purple, white and pink. The erect stems are likely to be between 60 and 80 cm in height.
The iris garden was planted on the orders of Emperor Meiji as a gift to his wife, Empress Haruko. She is said to have spent long hours in the final years of her life enjoying the peace of this garden from a rain-sheltered gazebo. Go early to relish a little of that peace and serenity. Just don’t forget to bring your umbrella.
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