The tendency toward cultural chauvinism and exceptionalism is hardly confined to Japan. I recall when living in rural France the dismal failure of an English couple to convince people that their restaurant could serve authentic local dishes.
Non-Japanese who dedicate themselves to mastering a Japanese art or cultural practice, who have the courage, or temerity, to practice it professionally, can expect a certain degree of skepticism — even the odd snarky remark from those around them. You would suppose that the practice of gardening in Japan, ostensibly borderless, would be the exception.
Foreigner visitors have taken an interest in Japanese gardens for a very long time. Luis Frois (1532-97), a Portuguese Jesuit and chronicler, gave early accounts, largely favorable, of the gardens he visited in Kyoto and Nara. Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716), a German physician, and Carl Peter Thunberg (1743-1828), a Swedish naturalist, provided detailed critiques of gardens and flora. British horticultural magazines dating from as early as 1800 contained many in-depth articles detailing the elements of a Japanese garden.
Knowledge of Japanese gardens was garnered from early travel journals, firsthand accounts, artworks, exhibitions and horticultural fairs. We see from postcards, photogravures and catalogs depicting the Japanese pavilions of the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris that visitors would, however, have encountered a simulacrum of the Japanese garden, rather than an authentic representation. Held in London’s White City district in 1910, the Japan-British Exhibition, offered a similar digest — its Garden of the Floating Islands a rather cluttered affair of clumsy stone placements akin to an English rockery. Despite the misleading landscaping at these international exhibitions in Europe and North America, the displays did nothing to quell the fashion among Westerners for Japonaiserie gardens.
After the Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) and British architect Josiah Conder (1852-1920) published their accounts of Japanese gardens, there has been a steady stream of notable visitors with special interests in the subject. Loraine Kuck (1894-1977) authored several key books, and writer Sacheverell Sitwell (1897-1988), visiting Kyoto in 1958, expressed unbridled admiration for its gardens. Superior in his view to those in Europe, he noted an “art form developed over a very long period of time... the great works of little masters.”
A devoted student of Zen, the composer John Cage (1912-92) was drawn to the dry landscape form. His abstract score for “Ryoanji,” a composition involving variable instruments and voice, evolved from notes and drawings of the iconic garden. British painter David Hockney used over 130 layered Polaroid images for his photo montage, “Walking in the Zen Garden at the Ryoanji Temple, Kyoto.” He sought to make sense of its perfect rectangular form and asymmetric content by dismantling and reassembling it. You can see the artist’s feet, one sock red and the other brown, moving gingerly along the viewing deck. “Moss Garden,” a track from David Bowie’s “Heroes” album, was inspired by the Japanese garden at Saihoji temple in Kyoto.
Architects with green thumbs
A look at gardens created by non-Japanese is instructive in highlighting divergent approaches to the form.
The architecture of the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art effortlessly complements the garden segments created by American landscape designer Peter Walker. No stranger to Japan, the architect’s early ideas, germinating during his days as a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, were profoundly influenced by his Japanese tutor, Hideo Sasaki. Opened in 1995, the first feature visitors see is a large pond with a linear grid of Japanese irises, an arrangement resembling the serried rows of a rice field. With a lone willow tree and a bubbling fountain, the sheet of water acts as a forecourt to the transparent facades of the museum buildings. In a reinterpretation of a classic form, the museum’s outdoor dry landscape garden includes stone lanterns in the form of polished black steles. With its confining walls, the only exterior view is the sky.
Early in his career, Argentinian architect Emilio Ambasz experienced a dream of an aerial garden in a “high-density city.” That vision materialized with the 1995 completion of the Acros Fukuoka Prefectural Hall, a tiered structure resembling a set of rice-terraces or a ziggurat. Each of its 14 shelves, all accessible by stairways, support waterfalls surrounded by some 50,000 plants of more than 120 species.
The world’s first roof gardens, in fact, are said to have been built on the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, their terraces of hanging vines and flowers providing shaded relief in the desert climate. The completion in 2003 of Namba Parks, a nine-story shopping mall and cinema complex elevated above the urban sprawl of Osaka, achieves a similar, if a bit smaller, biotope of water vapor-releasing plants.
More a garden in Japan than a Japanese garden, Namba Parks was created by American architect Jon Jerde and is highly representative of the late architect’s work. In a huge undertaking, 300 species of plants and 70,000 trees were planted throughout the open-air sections of the complex. Flowers, groves of trees, shrubs, waterfalls, ponds, rock clusters, miniature lawns and an artificial stream create bird- and insect-friendly environs far removed from city’s pullulating tumult.
The recently created Aoyama Wall, a high-end fruit cocktail bar located inside Tokyo’s Emergence Aoyama Complex, does little to advertise itself. Visitors enter through an unmarked door, then take a stool at the bar’s long counter, a viewing platform for an extraordinarily fecund vertical garden supporting moss, ostrich ferns, climbing fig, philodendron and several types of herbaceous plantings. As a student, its creator, the French botanist Patrick Blanc, studied the life of plants in their natural habitats — particularly life forms that grow at low light levels in the rainforest amid rock crevices, tree trunks and soil-less slopes bereft of water. Credited as the inventor of the vertical garden, Blanc’s work attempts to blur the line between landscaping and architecture by integrating nature and urbanism in a verdant, enjoined space. Small scale models of biodiversity in an urban setting, Blanc’s gardens have been described as “botanical tapestries.”
Located in a quiet neighborhood along the Kamogawa River, the opening of Genji Kyoto in the spring of 2022 represented the fusion of two creative minds: Kyoto-based landscape designer and author of several books on gardens Marc P. Keane and architect Geoffrey P. Moussas. Each of the rooms of this stylish boutique hotel contains either its own tsubo niwa (a compressed courtyard garden) or a weathered stone garden object. Guests entering the hotel lobby face the Ukifune Garden, a dry, winding stream representing the passage of life. The name, taken from a chapter of the 11th-century “The Tale of Genji,” means “a boat adrift,” a metaphor for the impermanence of life. To stay within the walls of the hotel with its rich garden and literary references is to fleetingly inhabit a work of art.
Keane more recently embarked on a project with Kajita Shinsho, the head priest of Honen-in, a temple standing on a ridge above Kyoto’s Philosopher’s Path, who invited him to create a design for a private courtyard. The premise for the garden was the kinetic character of nature illustrated by the carbon cycle, a reusable system in which carbon atoms pass from the atmosphere into organisms then exit back into the air. In Keane’s visualization of this process, charcoal sticks were embedded in a shallow trench, forming a winding line through a bed of off-white gravel. The sinuous passage of his “Empty River” garden snakes around the trunks and roots of camellias, the only manifestation, aside from a number of Andromeda ferns, of greenery.
Having worked on several landscape designs in Japan, Keane would seem the right person to consult on the subject of non-Japanese involvement in gardens. A “very hands-on designer,” he engages a Japanese gardener and crew when working on projects. I asked him if he had ever encountered any skepticism from Japanese people in the gardening establishment. Keane was adamant in affirming the absence of any form of resistance to him working in a field that has traditionally been the preserve of Japanese.
“All my clients have come through personal connections, and there has never been a sense of reticence on the part of any of them.”
The borrowed view
For more than 30 years, Mark Hovane has been a habitue of Kyoto, where he runs Kyoto Garden Experience, an organization that caters to individuals and small groups with a serious interest in Japanese landscape art and horticulture. Hovane has also designed a number of small courtyard gardens for private clients.
“Coming from the vast continent of Australia where space engulfs and overwhelms,” he says when asked his view as an outsider on the Japanese garden, “I have become hyper-aware of the delicacy of implied space in the smallest of pocket-sized gardens in Japan.”
Hovane is optimistic that he can make a contribution to the field of garden design.
“To the extent that I am successful at ‘interpreting’ some of the hidden context of design, I get to be a little closer toward being an ‘insider’ who is able to explain these complex works of art from the ‘inside’ out.”
British landscape designer and plant specialist Dan Pearson is another outsider. Asked to complete the final phase of the Tokaichi Sennen no Mori (Tokachi Millennium Forest) in Hokkaido, Pearson was commissioned by newspaper tycoon Mitsushige Hayashi to offset the carbon footprint of his business and introduce Japanese flora and ecosystems to the public. The Tokaichi Sennen no Mori’s earth, forest, farm, meadow and rose gardens appear more an extension of natural landscaping, but Pearson was scrupulous in including native plants and even incorporating the Japanese garden principle of shakkei (borrowed view) in resculpturing an empty pasture into a series of concave and convex ridges that would invite distant foothills into the foreground.
Attuned to Japanese design imperatives but still independent from them, these diverse projects from non-Japanese practitioners have in common, aside from originality of concept, the ability to place nature and gardens at the heart of the human experience.
Creating Arcadia
A flawed, but determined amateur, my main claim to designing and building a Japanese-style home landscape, something I embarked on a few years ago, was the publication of several books on the topic and visits to more than 500 gardens stretching from Hokkaido to Okinawa. However, no amount of observation or theory can completely prepare you for the practicalities of design.
By Japanese suburban standards, the plot my wife and I now owned, at 220.8 meters, was generously proportioned, the house taking up roughly half of the land. The former owner had placed a number of rocks in the original garden, their top surfaces cut and polished for a showy, lapidary effect. One large specimen was a blue-toned ao ishi (chlorite schist) stone of the kind popular among postwar middle-class homeowners. These would have to go. Their replacements: a selection of darker river bed and mountain stones from Gunma Prefecture.
I ordered bamboo from a supplier in Kyoto, and the fence was constructed on site after the wood was scrubbed, fired and treated against insect invasion. Fences are part of the revealing and concealing process, which is an important concept in Japanese gardening. Depending upon your immediate environs, you will want to “borrow” a view — or wish to conceal one. In the case of urban Japanese homes, the latter is more likely.
Twenty maki (podocarps), a tree of darkish green common to traditional Japanese gardens, form a three-sided interior border. With healthy annual growth, they enhance privacy and help to create mass. Most of the original garden was covered in a gray sand not unlike industrial road gravel. This was replaced with 400 pieces of turf.
Perhaps the most difficult thing in creating an authentic Japanese garden is in making a new design look like an old one. Japan’s humid summers help to accelerate the process, and a young garden can begin to look weathered in a relatively short time. The use of recycled objects like temple pillar stones, water basins and millstones can help create this time-tested illusion.
Despite all the work and an ongoing battle against invasive weeds, my garden remains incomplete. As I have discovered over the years, however, the joy of a garden is that it may be started but never finished.
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