The Art of Creative Pruning by Jake Hobson

Author:Jake Hobson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: 2011-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

JAPAN

Gardens in Japan can be broken down into several core groups. Temple gardens, palaces, castles and parks are where the traditional art of the garden lies, as seen in books and witnessed by visitors to Kyoto. Within temple gardens in particular, there is an enormous variety of styles, including those of tea gardens, dry gardens, moss gardens and what people describe nowadays as zen gardens. Almost without exception, these various styles of Japanese gardens all contain examples of niwaki pruning, along with the other key ingredients of Japanese gardens: rocks and water.

The term zen was actually coined by an American, Lorraine Kuck, in her 1935 book, One Hundred Gardens of Kyoto, and only since then has it been adopted by the Japanese and considered a historical style. Shoji Yamada’s fascinating book Shots in the Dark looks in great detail at how this myth of zen was propagated and distorted in the twentieth century, giving rise to the current notions held by many Japanese and non-Japanese alike, of the influence of zen in the garden. It is not for me to comment, but it raises interesting points about how opinion changes over time and how what we take for granted is not necessarily the only way of thinking.

Beyond these more familiar gardens, there are the millions of small, private ones all over the country, from contemporary city gardens to the informal yards of rural homes. These gardens share some of the aesthetics of the temples and palace gardens, but due to their size (most private gardens, especially in towns and cities where space is scarce, are small) the sense of scale is reduced. The landscape of Japan is still the underlying theme, but this can sometimes be reduced to no more than a few trees and a path as an approach to the house. Alongside the symbolism and the cultural associations that are linked to the art of the garden are the more basic necessities: privacy, shade and tranquility.

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