Visionary Landscapes. Kendall H. Brown
as a tea garden. At the Sarah P. Duke Gardens, he realized curator Paul Jones’ vision of a hillside waterfall-and-stream garden redolent of an abandoned warrior’s villa. For a garden between the home and studio of a potter, Uchiyama’s woodland stream creates a centered focus for the artisan at her wheel, a place to wander at leisure, and also captures distant views of Puget Sound and the Cascades.
Making Gardens Meaningful
The preceding paragraphs, which discussed gardens as solo productions, create the misleading impression that gardens, like paintings or sculptures, are made by heroic creators. In fact, most gardens are collaborative, and gardens of sufficient history are revised by the hands of time and by the hands of multiple makers and caregivers. Although writing about Buddhist practice, the famous priest and garden enthusiast Musō Soseki (1275–1351) wrote, “He who distinguishes between the garden and practice cannot be said to have found the way.”5
For homeowners, whose garden connections are personal, there is no escaping the reality of gardens as process rather than product. The intimate, nuanced pleasures of evolving a garden are clearly seen in the hillside home of Stu and Jane Bowyer in Orinda, California, and in their writing about it (see next page). Implicit in their experience is a willingness to change unsuccessful features. Living with the garden, they embrace its transformation through partnerships with diverse specialists.6
If working closely with talented garden builders and pruners is gratifying, then making a garden oneself is potentially even more rewarding. For this reason, and because people mistakenly think that gardens are easy to construct and maintain, there is a plethora of how-to books.7 However, the numerous poor and abandoned self-made gardens suggests that Japanese-style gardens are best left to professionals intimately involved with the client. The rare exceptions reveal the great diligence required to create successful gardens as well as their profound benefits.
The hillside waterfall that flows from the street to the front of the Bowyer home in Orinda, CA, exemplifies how well-designed and maintained gardens provide places of dynamic tranquility for homeowners.
In 2000, artist Adel M. and her architect husband bought an historic house by modernist architect Harwell Harris. Built in 1942 on a hillside near downtown Los Angeles, the house was inspired by Japanese design in its open-floor plan, modular wooden construction and indoor–outdoor integration. After sensitively expanding the house to create several courtyards, they hired a landscape architect to redesign the backyard slope. Dissatisfied with a result inappropriate to both architecture and environment, they removed the garden and decided to create themselves a series of Japanese-style gardens based on their intimate knowledge of their site, vast reading, travel to Japan and design experience. Working with a staff of three gardeners, over a decade the self-taught couple have fashioned courtyard gardens, bamboo groves, a pond garden buffered by high, undulating hedges inspired by Kyoto’s Shugakuin Villa, and a series of garden paths and rooms connecting the main house to a guest house below.
Creating Our Garden Home
In making a residential Japanese garden over forty years, our method is to find the best specialists and enlist their help. We have worked with four local masters: Mr Sato to make initial blueprints and create the dry lake; Henry Matsutani to design and build a waterfall; Dennis Makishima to shape trees and plantings; and Bill Castellan to place rocks. We read extensively about traditional gardens. When traveling to Japan as university professors, we always visit at least one major garden and stay in Japanese ryokan inns with gardens. After each visit, we incorporate new ideas.
Our obsession with creating and maintaining this piece of art is based on the indoor–outdoor flow of our relatively small hillside home. With two exceptions, each room opens to the garden. Minimalist décor allows our screened windows to frame the garden. Creative, beautiful and peaceful, the garden is a seamless part of being home. The garden wakes us and peacefully ends our day.
Our design principles are those of good art. Fascinated by how illusion transforms space and time, we borrow scenery from the distant hills to expand our space. The waterfall masks the view and sound of a public road a few feet away. We feel joy when we walk past the shaped black pines, under the torii gate, through the gradual unfolding of smaller gardens. It is a journey of discovery to walk to and from our home. The view is never the same.
We provide garden maintenance as we can, aided by people who love the garden. We are intimately involved in each decision and guided by the wisdom of the four masters. Our garden means life to us.
Jane and Stu Bowyer
Masterfully creating areas of intimacy and broad spaces that frame and capture distant views, the owner-designers carefully balance texture and color, mixing meticulously pruned plants (podocarpus juniper, miniature bay laurel and boxwoods) with a hardscape of gravel, stone, brick and slate. The hill garden is shaded by cork oak and California live oak as well as eucalyptus, with a mid-story of black pines, plum, toyon and agonis pruned in Japanese styles when possible. A perpetual work in progress, the garden is the proverbial labor of love, receiving significant investments of time, thought and money. Made—and remade—slowly, by multiple hands and under the direction of an artist and architect, the garden is a creative expression and immersive environment that comforts both body and mind.
The collaborative creativity of gardens may be broad. In the traditional model, a master works with a cohort of relatives and employees. In the contemporary case, professors of landscape architecture often utilize colleagues and students. Trade associations also produce gardens, with specialists often linking to complete a project in a distant place in a short time. For instance, in response to the 2011 disaster in Japan’s Tōhoku region, the Garden Society of Japan (Nihon teien kyōkai) created a garden to commemorate the disaster and recovery. Professionals from across Japan joined with garden students from Japan and abroad in a project where the spirit of human connection was as important as the resulting landscape.
Collective garden building thrives in Britain where members of the Japanese Garden Society (JGS), led by Graham Hardman and Robert Ketchell, began to build gardens in 2005. After making small courtyard gardens at public venues, from 2009 they have made gardens at hospices. In 2014, for example, eighteen JGS volunteers contributed 300 individual days to create a large garden at Bury Hospice. One volunteer, Ioan Davies, along with Hardman, wrote a haiku, later placed on a garden plaque, which encapsulates the project’s value for both users and makers: “From tarmac and turf/a landscape, islands and seas:/solace for the soul.”8
Collaborations can produce gardens and goodwill, but the joy of creation can overshadow the quotidian care required for a successful garden. Arguably, the commemorative function of many Japanese-style gardens celebrates completion but ignores maintenance. Moreover, emphasis on garden builders obscures the critical role of gardeners in a living art. To compound the problem, in Japan the hereditary system of garden makers-caretakers has eroded. In North America, first- and second-generation Japanese gardeners, men dedicated to a profession linked with cultural identity, have died off. Lacking adequate attention, gardens invariably decline.
To remedy this deterioration of gardens, gardening knowledge and systems of garden education, thoughtful gardeners are revising old paradigms of creation and maintenance and actively passing on what they know. Tomoki Katō, the eighth-generation head of Kyoto garden firm Ueyakatō and a PhD in garden history, has proposed the concept of fostering rather than maintaining. Fostering stresses the gardener’s dynamic role in raising a garden as one raises a child from birth to adulthood and old age. Katō proposes that a garden is 40 percent the product of its being built and 60 percent the product of fostering. For Katō, the craftsman is a student learning constantly from gardens, from tradition, which itself is innovative, and from the team through shared sensibility and collective experience. Because gardens outlive their creators and initial caretakers, Katō’s concept of fostering extends from nurturing gardens to cultivating generations of gardeners.9
The Garden of a Thousand Views at Bury Hospice in england