Visionary Landscapes. Kendall H. Brown
gardens again enhanced homes and businesses. They also became the focus of public friendship gardens. Recognized as places rich with symbolism and life force, Japanese-style gardens were created at facilities—from schools and hospitals to prisons—linked with growth, rehabilitation and endurance. During the war, Japanese Americans incarcerated in Relocation Camps built high-quality gardens to bind the wounds of dislocation, isolation and group living while stressing the vibrant adaptability of Japanese culture.
New York Times World’s Fair Section, 1939. Courtesy of Nancy e. Green.
David Slawson’s naturalistic Garden of Quiet Listening, created in 1976 at Carleton College, Northfield, MN, seeks to evoke a native place rather than a fantasy of Japan. It thrives under the thoughtful guidance of John Powell and a team of local gardeners.
An example of pre-World War II exoticism, the Japanese Garden built in 1928 at Swinney Park, Fort Wayne, IN, featured a miniature Mt Fuji, waterfalls, a pond, a teahouse, Japanese iris and 25 kinds of peony. Photo courtesy of Kendall Brown.
Recreated and reimagined with impressive devotion, the phenomenon of the Japanese-style garden may appear as a kind of chronic modern madness. Given the expense of building and maintaining gardens that are living, and thus fugitive, art forms, and the audacity of transplanting the product of one culture in foreign soils, this devotion seems a kind of folly. Indeed, most Japanese-style gardens created before World War II, and many after it, were abandoned in time. Yet, new gardens have been built without cessation, often reusing the “bones”—the stones, lanterns and plants—of defunct ones. The allure of gardens has outlived Japan crazes in crafts and waves of Japonisme in the arts. If history is a guide, gardens will abide when the fascination with anime (animation) and manga (comics) is long past.
The reasons for this Japanese garden madness are in part social and historical. With Japanese gardens signaling sophistication, the desire for status surely motivates their acquisition. Creating a Japanese garden also expresses a human desire to appropriate foreign things in a cultural masquerade that satisfies our inquisitiveness while cloaking the mundane facts of life. For North Americans and post-war Europeans, Japanese culture, manifested most holistically and immersively in gardens, offers a beguiling alternative to the old European order and opens up an unfamiliar perspective that presents the world afresh.
Japanese-style gardens also connect with specific historical contexts, for instance, with the American immigration themes of assimilation and alienation. For Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, emboldened and burdened by manifest destiny, Japanese gardens proffered fantasy landscapes that both enhanced and questioned the great projects of subduing the land and its peoples, and then moving upward in cities premised on endless progress. Created across the vast continent, Japanese gardens fit into the pioneer narratives of taming nature by making it bountiful and beautiful and imprinting it with foreign cultures. Alternately, American Japanese gardens complicate the discourse of European civilization, which is resolutely practical and masculine, extending inexorably and inevitably westward.
More broadly, in the modern age of disenchantment, Japanese-style gardens offer re-enchantment. In an epoch of ideological fissures manifest in world wars, then international terrorism, and marked physically by dramatic, even cataclysmic technological development, Japanese-style gardens sustain belief in the redemptive power of nature and the reinventive potential of culture. With deep roots in nature and culture, gardens can nurture as well as liberate.
The social history of Japanese-style gardens opens itself to multiple critiques. As Western constructs of Japan, gardens form a rich chapter for the study of Orientalism. As projections of Japan’s imagined uniqueness, they exemplify Japan’s strategic self-Orientalizing. Japanese-style gardens also demonstrate the commodification of culture by the relentless culture industry. Gardens at world fairs and sister-city projects show how art and history are deployed for political agendas.
Historical analyses clarify some basic motivations for and implications of Japanese-style gardens. Social factors also help explain why so many Westerners and some Japanese have been content with garish pastiches. However, the circumstances around gardens do not account for the deeper resonances of human experience in them. Historical investigation does not address the affective power that has made Japanese-style gardens so compelling to so many people in so many places for so many years. Although improbable luxuries in many ways, Japanese-style gardens can serve functions critical for our lives. Surely gardens are necessary follies.
People invest deeply in Japanese-style gardens because, when well designed and thoughtfully fostered, they have a rare capacity to move us, to hold us in awe, to take us on a journey. Increasingly, the journey is not to Japan. Now, Japanese-style gardens function less as microcosms of Japan, repudiating the old world fair’s function of imagined travel. Rather, they perform more effectively as Japanese-inspired microcosms of nature. The overtly Japanese features—moon bridges, cherry trees, lanterns—signal a cultural affiliation conveyed more profoundly in the ideas informing the arrangement and care of the plants, rocks and waterways. When present in moderation, signs of Japan, of foreignness, help us believe more deeply in a garden as an alternative order, a world complete in itself. This sense of leave-taking is symbolized and internalized by passage through the gate that often begins the physical garden journey. Letting go of the old, leaving the mundane, we enter new realities open to new possibilities. Losing ourselves we find ourselves.
At the Denver Botanic Gardens’ Garden of Pine Winds, the main gate was enlarged and relocated in 2012 as Sadafumi Uchiyama’s master plan enhanced visitor flow. A signature ponderosa pine was also transplanted.
New Japanese Garden Journeys
For Japanese-style gardens around the world, the 21st century signals a new era. The histories of gardens in Japan and Japanese-style gardens abroad are established, their links and differences clarified, so that huckster language proclaiming an authentic Japanese garden should induce a regretful cringe rather than wide-eyed admiration. Untethered from simply representing Japan by proxy, Japanese-style gardens are blooming in diverse ways. Models of hybridity, synthesis, adaptability and even sustainability, they are dynamic translations, not transplanted copies. Japanese-style gardens shift our perception of the originals and allow us to root ourselves more deeply in the world. Institutions and organizations in Japan, America and Europe debate and plan the evolving identities of gardens as an immersive living art. Gardens are places that we actively nurture. They are environments that nurture us individually and collectively. They are resonant sites for physical and mental healing, for repose and self-cultivation, for individual and social transformation.
In the books Japanese-style Gardens of the Pacific West Coast and Quiet Beauty: The Japanese Gardens of North America, my goal was to move from the appealing mystery of Japanese gardens to the accounts of the people who commissioned and created Japanese-style gardens. The first study, written with an air of academic melancholy, sought to shift the discourse from soft rhetoric about essences and authenticity to the hard ground of social, political and cultural circumstance. The second survey suggested how public gardens reflect aspects of North American cultural relations with Japan over the past 120 years.
This book extends that trajectory to connect Japanese-style gardens with the minds and hearts of the people who create and utilize them now. For the author, this book rejects the historian’s ostensibly objective presentation of the past to advocate for Japanese-style gardens as transformative spaces now and in the future. It examines gardens built in the past two decades to reveal some of the most recent ideas about their design and function. It expands the scope from public gardens to gardens at homes and businesses to indicate how gardens impact us where we live and work. Because the pleasure and power of Japanese-style gardens bridge the intentions of their creators with the efforts and experiences of their users, I include mini-essays