Japanese Gardens

Japanese gardens (日本庭園, nihon teien) are traditional gardens whose designs are accompanied by Japanese aesthetics and philosophical ideas, avoid artificial ornamentation, and highlight the natural landscape.

Plants and worn, aged materials are generally used by Japanese garden designers to suggest a natural landscape, and to express the fragility of existence as well as time's unstoppable advance. 

Ancient Japanese art inspired past garden designers. Water is an important feature of many gardens, as are rocks and often gravel. Despite there being many attractive Japanese flowering plants, herbaceous flowers generally play much less of a role in Japanese gardens than in the West, though seasonally flowering shrubs and trees are important, all the more dramatic because of the contrast with the usual predominant green. Evergreen plants are "the bones of the garden" in Japan. Though a natural-seeming appearance is the aim, Japanese gardeners often shape their plants, including trees, with great rigour.

Japanese literature on gardening goes back almost a thousand years, and several different styles of garden have developed, some with religious or philosophical implications.

A characteristic of Japanese gardens is that they are designed to be seen from specific points. Some of the most significant different traditional styles of Japanese garden are the chisen-shoyū-teien ("lake-spring-boat excursion garden"), which was imported from China during the Heian period (794–1185). These were designed to be seen from small boats on the central lake. No original examples of these survive, but they were replaced by the "paradise garden" associated with Pure Land Buddhism, with a Buddha shrine on an island in the lake. Later large gardens are often in the kaiyū-shiki-teien, or promenade garden style, designed to be seen from a path circulating around the garden, with fixed stopping points for viewing. Specialized styles, often small sections in a larger garden, include the moss garden, the dry garden with gravel and rocks, associated with Zen Buddhism, the roji or teahouse garden, designed to be seen only from a short pathway, and the tsubo-niwa, a very small urban garden.

Most modern Japanese homes have little space for a garden, though the tsubo-niwa style of tiny gardens in passages and other spaces, as well as bonsai (in Japan always grown outside) and houseplants mitigates this, and domestic garden tourism is very important. The Japanese tradition has long been to keep a well-designed garden as near as possible to its original condition, and many famous gardens appear to have changed little over several centuries, apart from the inevitable turnover of plants, in a way that is extremely rare in the West.

Awareness of the Japanese style of gardening reached the West near the end of the 19th century, and was enthusiastically received as part of the fashion for Japonisme, and as Western gardening taste had by then turned away from rigid geometry to a more naturalistic style, of which the Japanese style was an attractive variant. They were immediately popular in the UK, where the climate was similar and Japanese plants grew well. Japanese gardens, typically a section of a larger garden, continue to be popular in the West, and many typical Japanese garden plants, such as cherry trees and the many varieties of Acer palmatum or Japanese maple, are also used in all types of garden, giving a faint hint of the style to very many gardens.

Japanese gardens are distinctive in their symbolism of nature, with traditional Japanese gardens being very different in style from occidental gardens: "Western gardens are typically optimised for visual appeal while Japanese gardens are modelled with spiritual and philosophical ideas in mind." Japanese gardens are conceived as a representation of a natural setting, tying in to Japanese connections between the land and Shinto spiritualism, where spirits are commonly found in nature; as such, Japanese gardens tend to incorporate natural materials, with the aim of creating a space that captures the beauties of nature in a realistic manner.

Traditional Japanese gardens can be categorized into three types: tsukiyama (hill gardens), karesansui (dry gardens) and chaniwa gardens (tea gardens).

The small space given to create these gardens usually poses a challenge for the gardeners. Due to the absolute importance of the arrangement of natural rocks and trees, finding the right material becomes highly selective. The serenity of a Japanese landscape and the simple but deliberate structures of the Japanese gardens are a unique quality, with the two most important principles of garden design being "scaled reduction and symbolization".

Japanese gardens always feature water, either physically with a pond or stream, or symbolically, represented by white sand in a dry rock garden. In Buddhist symbolism, water and stone are thought of as yin and yang, two opposites that complement and complete each other. A traditional garden will usually have an irregular-shaped pond or, in larger gardens, two or more ponds connected by a channel or stream, and a cascade, a miniature version of Japan's famous mountain waterfalls.

In traditional gardens, the ponds and streams are carefully placed according to Buddhist geomancy, the art of putting things in the place most likely to attract good fortune. The rules for the placement of water were laid out in the first manual of Japanese gardens, the Sakuteiki ("Records of Garden Making"), in the 11th century. According to the Sakuteiki, water should enter the garden from the east or southeast and flow toward the west, because the east is the home of the Green Dragon (seiryu), an ancient Chinese divinity adopted in Japan, and the west is the home of the White Tiger, the divinity of the east. Water flowing from east to west will carry away evil, and the owner of the garden will be healthy and have a long life.

According to the Sakuteiki, another favorable arrangement is for the water to flow from north, which represents water in Buddhist cosmology, to the south, which represents fire, which are opposites (yin and yang) and therefore will bring good luck.