Japanese Gardens for today. David Engel
deep green cover. Plant materials used here are cryptomeria, Japanese andromeda, Japanese maple, and Japanese holly. Designed by Tansai Sano. (Toyoda residence, Juso, Osaka Prefecture)
The preference for asymmetry was encouraged by Taoist and Zen teachings which intellectualized it as an element of Japanese esthetics. In The Book of Tea Kakuzo Okakura called his country's art the "abode of the unsymmetrical." Contrasting Western and Asian approaches to design, he pointed out how the Taoist-Zen conception of perfection differed from that of the West. The dynamic nature of Taoist and Zen philosophies "laid more stress upon the process through which perfection was sought than upon perfection itself. True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete. The virility of life and art lay in its possibilities for growth. In the tea-room (as in the garden) it is left for each guest in imagination to complete the total effect in relation to himself. Since Zen has become the prevailing mode of thought, the art of the Far East has purposely avoided bilateral symmetry as expressing not only completion but repetition. Uniformity of design was considered as fatal to the freshness of imagination. Thus, landscapes, birds and flowers became the favorite subjects for depiction rather than the human figure, the latter being present in the person of the beholder himself."
In another passage Okakura advised the artist to leave something unsaid so that the beholder be given the chance "to complete the idea. Thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of it. A vacuum; is. there for you to enter and fill up to the full measure of your esthetic emotion."....
This humanized naturalism of which we are speaking has a further human element in that, though a Japanese garden is basically naturalistic, it by no means is restricted to the use of nothing but natural forms. But, when geometrical, man-made shapes are used, they serve as a foil to frame and set off the elements of purely naturalistic form. For example, the straight line of a clipped hedge or a path of geometrically shaped steppingstones commonly serves as a contrasting non-naturalistic element. Or, geometrical shapes play an important role as symbols of natural forms. Thus, a bank of rounded, sheared azalea bushes in several sizes and heights, seemingly piled one upon the other in depth, may symbolize mountains. In such a case they are active, humanized substitutes for rock and stone, which, although inert, are also felt to have a life of their own (see Plate 5).
Line & Mass vs. Color. Besides the faithful adherence of the Japanese garden artist to principles of asymmetry, he depends also upon elements of line and mass rather than color to create his landscape design. The unity of the basic structure of the garden is formed by the arrangement of massed evergreen trees and shrubs combined with rocks and artifacts. The prevailing hues are in greens, browns, beiges, and greys, of varying tones. No matter what the season, the main lines and forms remain almost unchanged. The resort to line and mass in garden composition is again, as in the case of asymmetry, only the reproduction in humanized form of what the garden artist has observed in real nature. It is a rare and fleeting phenomenon when color figures importantly in the natural landscape of mountains, forests, seacoasts, streams, and fields. Thus, the garden-maker in Japan remains true to nature in adhering to line and mass for the principal structure of his garden, keeping color in a minor role. (See Plate 6.)
Fig. 1. Genji built a garden for Murasaki, his wife. One corner of it may well have looked like this garden belonging to a nobleman of the same time, the Heian period (794-1185). From the picture scroll Kasuga Gongen Reigen-ki.
Genji's Garden. Color was not always used with such restraint. In a much earlier period of Japanese history, from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, gardens were open, gay, and filled with flowers and blossoming trees and shrubs as well as all types of water features. They were naturalistic gardens built as idealizations of the real world outside, but more closely resembling the then-prevalent ideas of Heaven. The gardens adorned the palaces and villas of the royal family and wealthy nobles. They contained streams which wound through them to empty into lakes and ponds, which were often large enough to allow shallow-draft, flat-bottomed boats to cruise along their shores. These were boating and excursion gardens, which served as playgrounds for the ranks of the nobility. Islands in the lakes and ponds denoted such Chinese cosmological symbols as Horaijima, the Island of Paradise (see Plate 96). Sometimes a line of rocks was laid out in the water, yodomari-ishi, to represent ships moored at night in a Chinese harbor (Plate 98). Or, one rock projecting out of the water would symbolize takara-bune, the treasure ship of Chinese and Japanese legend.
For a picture of those gardens in the Heian period (794-1185) we have the colorful description (see also Fig. 1) written over a thousand years ago by Lady Murasaki Shikibu in her novel The Tale of Genji, as translated so ably by Arthur Waley:
"Genji effected great improvement in the appearance of the grounds by a judicious handling of knoll and lake, for, though such feature already there in abundance, he found it necessary here to cut away a slope, there to dam a stream, that each occupant of the various quarters might look out of her windows upon such a prospect as pleased her best. To the southeast he raised the level of the ground and on this bank planted a profusion of early flowering trees. At the foot of this slope the lake curved with especial beauty, and in the foreground, just beneath the windows, he planted borders of cinquefoil, of red-plum, cherry, wisteria, kerria, rock-azalea and other such plants as are at their best in springtime... while here and there, in places where they would not obstruct his main plan, autumn beds were cleverly interwoven with the rest.
"Akikonomu's garden was full of such trees as in autumn-time turn to the deepest hue. The stream above the waterfall was cleared out and deepened to a considerable distance; and that the noise of the cascade might carry further, he set great boulders in mid-stream, against which the current crashed and broke....
"In the northeastern garden there was a cool spring, the neighborhood of which seemed likely to yield an agreeable refuge from the summer heat. In the borders near the house upon this side he planted Chinese bamboos, and, a little further off, tall-stemmed forest trees whose thick leaves roofed airy tunnels of shade, pleasant as those of the most lovely upland wood. This garden was fenced with hedges of the white deutzia flower, the orange tree, the briar-rose and the giant peony; with many other sorts of bush and tall flower so skillfully spread about among them that neither spring nor autumn would ever lack in bravery.
"... Along the stream he planted appropriate purple irises.
To the north of Lady Akashi's rooms rose a high embankment, screened by a close-set wall of pine trees, planted there on the purpose that she might have the pleasure of seeing them when their boughs were laden with snow; and for her delight in the earlier days of the winter there was a great bed of chrysanthemums, which he pictured her enjoying on some morning when all the garden was white with frost.
"... Murasaki's Spring garden seemed to become every day more enchanting. The little wood on the hill beyond the lake, the bridge that joined the two islands, the mossy banks that seemed to grow greener not every day but every hour—could anything have looked more tempting.
"... The rowers brought them close in under the rocky bank of the channel between the two large islands... the shape of every little ledge and crag of stone had been as carefully devised as if a painter had traced them with his brush. Here and there in the distance the topmost boughs of an orchard showed above the mist, so heavily laden with blossoms that it looked as though a bright carpet were spread in mid-air. Far away they could just catch sight of Murasaki's apartments, marked by the deeper green of the willow boughs that swept her courtyards, and by the shimmer of her flowering orchards, which even at this distance seemed to shed their fragrance amid the isles and rocks. In the world outside, the cherry blossom was almost over; but here it seemed to laugh at decay, and around the palace even the wisteria that ran along the covered alleys and porticos was all in bloom, but not a flower past its best; while here, where the boats were tied, mountain-kerria poured its yellow blossom over the rocky cliffs in a torrent of color that was mirrored in the waters of the lake below.... "
Reflecting the mood of the court life of the period, those gardens of Genji's were for carefree pleasure for the