100 Japanese Gardens by Stephen Mansfield

100 Japanese Gardens by Stephen Mansfield

Author:Stephen Mansfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing


Only a quarter of its original size, unsightly office blocks now encroach on the garden’s peripheries.

The brightly painted Tsuten-kyo represents a miniaturized version of a similar maple-viewing bridge in Kyoto.

This stone promontory extends from a wooded Horai island.

Zigzag yatsu-hashi bridges are designed to offer eight views, often of iris fields.

NEZU SHRINE GARDEN

根津神社

Location: 1-28-9 Nezu, Bunkyo-ku. Hours: Mid-April to early May. Fee: ¥

Situated on a graduated slope within the precincts of Nezu Shrine, the Bunkyo Azalea Festival is one of the floral highlights of the city. Arguably the largest concentration of azaleas in the capital, over three thousand bushes occupy the 1.5 acre (0.6 hectare) grounds of the garden. Some one hundred varieties of the flower are on display, including, among the more common Kurume azaleas some rarities such as hanaguruma (pinwheel flowers), Fuji-tsutsuji (bean-size flowers) and karafune (black azalea). Azaleas have been long admired by the residents of Tokyo. Discovering that the local soil and climate were well suited to the cultivation of azaleas, Ito Ihee Sannojo, a nurseryman in the northern Somei district, then located on the rural outskirts of the city, began cultivating the plants in the mid-seventeenth century. With affordable cultivars like the azalea, gardening, formerly a preserve of the nobility and samurai class, was taken up by merchant families and commoners, who displayed plants in pots set out along the boundaries and stoops of their tiny homes. Catering to high levels of literacy among all classes of townspeople, combined with a love of horticulture that persists to this day, Sannojo published an illustrated catalog in 1692 listing over three hundred varieties of azalea.



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