Shifting landscapes: The state of traditional Japanese gardens
My neighbor's garden is a wonder to behold. Where you might expect to find trim box hedges, bamboo fences, subtle rock arrangements, junipers, conifers and pine, there are garden gnomes, an ornamental concrete wheelbarrow, pots of begonia, hanging baskets of pansies and an iron ...
'Cutting Back': The collected wisdom of an aesthetic pruner
Breezy, frequently humorous and self-scolding, Leslie Buck's "Cutting Back: My Apprenticeship in the Gardens of Kyoto" is a poignant look at the storied Japanese world of professional gardening.
'The Art of the Japanese Garden': Green-fingered insight into Japanese garden spaces
By delving into the history, development and intricate details of Japanese gardens, "The Art of the Japanese Garden" brings new appreciation and awareness to the art form.
This no garden variety book on Zen practice
The over-application of the term Zen to describe everything from interior design to restaurant menus pored over by celebrities and fashionistas to the expression a "Zen moment" can be tiresome. Zen Gardens and Temples of Kyoto, by John Dougill, Photography by John Einarsen. 144 pages TUTTLE PUBLISHING, ...
Leave ordinary life behind at a Japanese garden in Oregon
Visitors to the Portland Japanese Garden are invited to engage their senses in the subtleties of nature.
With every new construction in Japan, fewer trees
When houses are demolished, there is a very bad habit here of cutting down all the trees on the plot, leaving the ground cleared and empty for new construction.
Urban trees save megacities millions through cleaner air, cooler buildings: study
Trees in cities reduce air pollution, absorb carbon and protect people during heat waves, saving megacities more than $500 million a year in health care, energy costs and environmental protection, according to new research. With 1 in 10 people predicted to live in cities with ...
'Japanese Garden Notes': An informative photo book
"Japanese Garden Notes" is a gorgeous photo book that introduces aspects of traditional Japanese garden design. It walks the reader through the philosophy of "space and passage," "function and art" and "intent and time," explaining why certain details recur and the emotions they are ...
'Daimyo Gardens': a new perspective on Tokyo's venerable green spaces
Though overshadowed by Kyoto, which boasts more than 200 listed gardens, Tokyo likely has the foremost concentration of formal gardens of any Asian capital. Daimyo Gardens, by Yozaburo Shirahata, Translated by Imoto Chikako and Lynne E. Riggs.209 pages INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH CENTER FOR JAPANESE STUDIES KYOTO, Nonfiction. Garden ...
The powerful ambiguities of dry landscape arrangements, the inevitable questions they raise in relation to what constitutes a garden, the profundity of concepts and principals, many of them deriving from Taoism and Zen, never fail to baffle the uninitiated. Francoise Berthier, a professor of ...
Visitors to Korakuen Garden in Okayama, one of the nation's top three Japanese gardens, exceeded 800,000 for the first time in 15 years, thanks to a surge in tourism and events to lure young people. Attendance hit 817,260 in fiscal 2015 ended in March. The ...
The Hiroshima art triangle: a space to get lost in thought
'It's Tokyo minus the stress." That's how one Japanese colleague described Hiroshima to us shortly after my wife, Angeles, and I arrived here, near the end of the last millennium. So, what's its secret? Well, there's its size for a start. And having six ...
