Visionary Landscapes. Kendall H. Brown

      Miles Neilsen & the Rusted Hearts perform at the summer concert series at the Anderson Japanese Gardens, Rockford, IL. Photo by Nels Akerlund, courtesy of Anderson Japanese Gardens.

      Planned garden progression in North America is exemplified by David Slawson and John Powell. Recognizing that he was unable to care for the gardens he created, Slawson contacted Powell, a garden maker, pruning specialist and nurseryman, who had trained at Suzuki Zōen in Niigata and at the garden at the Adachi Museum of Art in Shimane. To adapt Slawson’s gardens to shifting conditions, Powell had to grasp Slawson’s ideas as well as local conditions. Realizing the relative brevity of his career, Powell trained local gardeners to support and eventually take over each garden’s care. Likewise, public garden administrators, having paid large sums to create gardens, are now investing in the gardeners who evolve and foster the designer’s vision.

      Making Gardens for People

      The rewards of fostering gardens extend beyond improving a garden’s condition. Home gardeners have long known that gardens, while beautiful to look at, connect hands and heart. Garden pleasures include the tender exercise of pruning, the satisfaction of helping living things thrive and the sense of transcending oneself through intimacy with the earth. These basic benefits, along with the very real status accrued through gardens when used for social events, likely informed the creation of historic gardens in Japan, whether at the villas of aristocrats, the temple residences of monks or the estates of warriors. However, in the 20th century, when these places became tourist sites, open during business hours for viewing on a roped path or from a verandah, gardens were stripped of their core values. Like the modern museum model they emulate, gardens became historic sites for passive viewing. Gardens created for moon-viewing parties now close at dark, visitors must not touch—much less pluck—a sprig of flowers and reading a pamphlet’s potted history replaces poetry writing as the expected literary activity.

      In the half-century after World War II, Japanese-style gardens largely followed the passive contemplation model authorized by Kyoto gardens entrenched within Japan’s tourist industry and cultural patrimony. The mode and mood of hushed reverence is often enhanced by a Japanese tea ceremony. It is broken only by the occasional Japanese festival that creates cultural cachet and weddings that bring cash. These joyous activities return human celebration, with music and drink, to gardens. They also extend visiting hours so that gardens soften in deepening shadows and are enriched by the scents of plants born on evening breezes.

      In the great awakening now transforming public Japanese-style gardens, many are expanding their activities to open wide as places for diverse and dynamic engagement. Education, for instance, often extends beyond Japanese culture to art instruction for children and adults and special tours for the blind and those with special needs. Gardens now host art installations where art works intervene, often spectacularly, in the landscape. Some universities are planning gardens as part of mindfulness programs to liberate students from the mindlessness of cyber pop culture.

      The myriad activities possible in gardens are exemplified by the Anderson Japanese Gardens in Rockford, Illinois. The once private garden has not only opened to the public but during a half-year season hosts an astounding array of social events: a summer festival, evening concerts, Friday night socials, a lecture series, tea ceremonies, children’s classes and explorer tours, creative arts’ workshops and health and wellness programs, including Early Onset Alzheimer walks, in addition to weddings and private parties. Most revealing of the Anderson’s social mission is a program bringing patients from Rosecrance, an adolescent substance abuse treatment center, to the garden. There, they work with gardeners to foster the garden, an environment rich in biophilia and cultural markers of harmonious connection. The garden’s size and complexity allow it to facilitate social communion and still stimulate solitary contemplation.

      Arguably, this potential for direct engagement with nearby nature is what makes all gardens compelling. Because Japanese-style gardens function so persuasively as physical and philosophical microcosms, their pull is even stronger. The almost uncanny attraction of Japanese-style gardens is best revealed in the stories of the people who give their time and energy to work in them. The word “volunteer” conjures an image of a docent leading a group of students, the latter glad to be out of class and the former happy for an audience. Docent guides are important but volunteers accomplish more for gardens and for themselves. For example, they often do detailed but non-specialized tasks like weeding and deadheading blossoms that may seem tedious—like a form of punishment—for the paid worker but are therapeutic for the volunteer.

      Most every volunteer program is full of talented people, working or retired, who “find themselves” in garden work. When Duke Gardens, next to a hospital, built a new Japanese garden, several retired medical staff volunteered. One, retired nurse Flora O’Brien, took on moss care as her specialty. Calmed by the focus of pulling leaves and pine needles from moss beds, after each session O’Brien composed a garden-based haiku. On September 17, 2015, she wrote: “In the quiet pool/ pine needles float/on the sky.”¹⁰ The poem, crystalizing one deep experience of nature, reveals the power of engagement with a garden to pull us fully into the moment, then transcend it.

      In 2012, retired student advisor Martin McKellar began to volunteer in the new rooftop Japanese-style gardens at the University of Florida’s Harn Museum. Intrigued by the patterns raked in the gravel of the dry garden, McKellar visited Japan to learn techniques and styles. His ground-up fascination with raking resulted in accidental discovery of its contemplative aspect. Feeling that he had been raking with his ego, McKellar started making patterns to “appease kami, not visitors.” He next pursued raking as a therapeutic activity for patients in the university hospital, working with the university’s Arts in Medicine program inspired by the idea that “fine arts heal.”¹¹

      The appeal of volunteering may also connect with identity, yet exceed it. In 2015, at age 78, Dawn Ishimaru Frazier began volunteering in the Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden. Created in Pasadena from 1935 to 1940, the large residential garden had been recently renovated and opened to the public. Raised in rural Reedley, California by a second-generation mother and an immigrant father who worked at local orchards, Frazier later lived in large houses in several cities. Widowed, relocated to an urban condo and finished volunteering at museums, she felt the need to touch, with gloveless hands, the living earth. Doing basic pruning and clean-up for four hours a week, Frazier enjoys the garden’s quietude, time with other like-minded people and seeing things grow in a place that recalls her rural childhood and her parents’ culture. “The critical thing,” she says, “is connecting to soil, to plants . . . to something with a bigger, longer history.”¹² The sway of gardens on volunteers speaks to kinds and depths of engagement beyond the familiar binaries of labor and leisure, creation and consumption, private and public. Indeed, the transcendence of such boundaries is part of the appeal of giving oneself to a garden that is not one’s own. Gardens make deep connections.