Of Gardens: Selected Essays

Chapter Six: Japanese

Japanese 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 292 8/10/10 1:45:05 PM " 7 - ., ~ .-,.-::!.. .. -!t:::' • • B!IIIu~ funIJH~~~~ 293 L Autumn in Japan Long before the International style in architecture gave cities all over the world a similar look, garden designs spread over the centuries from country to country. Without traveling at all, a garden aficionado could visit Italian terraces, French parterres, or English borders. Even George Washington’s garden at Mount Vernon has been recreated in Bath, England. Yet there is no substitute for going to the source, because gardens as originally conceived are wedded not only to a place but to a culture. Before my recent sojourn in Japan, I believed that I knew something about Japanese gardens. Every spring I visit the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Japanese garden at cherry blossom time and walk along its manicured paths lined with clipped azaleas. And in Maine, where I summer, moss gardens with snow lanterns are a common genre along the coast. But to see gardens in Japan, particularly in Kyoto, is to observe unexpected details that are as powerful as they are simple: images and sounds that bring vividly to life landscapes that pale when reproduced without this cultural overlay. First, in the stillness of Saiho-ji Temple, as visitors ritually dip brushes into ink to write on wooden panels before entering the moss garden, there comes from outside the rhythmic sound of sweeping. Inside the garden, this sound pervades the autumnal air. Its visual accompaniments include the implements used to sweep the leaves—rustic brooms and woven winnowers that scoop up the piles—and the sweepers themselves dressed in faded indigo stripes and plaids. Also unexpected here, at the height of autumn color, is the juxtaposition of the crimson canopy of Japanese maples fanned Facing page: Jerry Harpur, Japanese Zen garden by Marc Peter Keane, Kyoto. 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 293 8/10/10 1:45:05 PM c h a p t e r s i x 294 out over the ponds and nearby hedges of pink camellias in full bloom. At 35 degrees north, Kyoto is on the same latitude as Tunisia and North Carolina. Seasonal rituals dominate the entire culture in Japan, especially in small galleries which rotate their collections. Hanging scrolls with poems brushed in calligraphy are embellished with branches of autumn leaves. At the Hatakeyama Memorial Museum of Fine Art in Tokyo, a place devoted to the tea ceremony, a wooden tea caddy is stored in a silk sack in autumnal colors and a water container from the Momoyama period is decorated with migrating geese. The traditional flower arrangement at the tea ceremony during this season is a single camellia bud with a branch of dry leaves. On the autumn holiday called Culture Day, women coming and going to the teahouses in the Hatakeyama stroll garden wore kimonos in patterns depicting the flowers and leaves of autumn. And on the lawn, surrounded by bamboo hedges, grasses, and shrubberies covered in red berries, lunch was prepared at long low tables covered in festive red felt and protected by a red parasol, creating a genre scene like a print from the Floating World. Persimmons are the true color of autumn. Their smooth orange-red skin glows from trees and from neighborhood fruit stands like shimmering carp in garden ponds. Just outside the garden wall at Shinju-an, an old Zen monastery , a tree with only a single persimmon remaining signals the season’s end. At the same moment as this becomes visible, the visitor hears from an inner courtyard the repeated hollow knock of the shishi-odoshi, the bamboo pipe that strikes a rock each time it empties of water and swings up, marking the passage of time. Pervading all the gardens is the utilitarian but texturally beautiful black twine called warabinawa. Lashed around the joints of bamboo fences or the wooden stakes that stabilize young trees, the twine weathers to earthy shades of brown. It also holds together elaborate arbors created to support ancient cherry trees, as well as bamboo lattice pergolas for wisteria vines. In a tea garden, a simple stone tied with the mundane twine signifies a path that is off limits. Japan is a land where uneven numbers are preferred for their asymmetry —especially seven, five and three (totaling fifteen), as can be seen in numerous sand gardens, such as Ryoan-ji, with their clusters of rock islands. Stepping stones along garden...