9/18/2023 0 Comments Zen gardens in america![]() The museum’s dry landscape garden combines a number of elements including shrubs and large rocks meant to represent a larger river landscape with a towering waterfall. Closely linked to traditional Japanese ink paintings, Zenko viewed these gardens as unrolled scrolls. Home to six separate gardens, the Adachi Museum of Art’s landscapes are filled with plants and rocks that were carefully collected from across Japan by the museum’s founder, Adachi Zenko. The Adachi Museum of Art Yasugi, Shimane Prefecture, Japan The northern temple grounds also house a Zen rock garden, which was arranged by the famed Japanese rock gardener, Muso Soseki. Created in the 14th century, the moss formed later when the temple went in to disrepair. Porter Memorial Japanese GardenĪlso known as the Moss Temple, Saiho-ji’s famous moss garden is an example of an early Zen garden. Roji-en: Garden of the Drops of Dew, The George D. The Japanese Garden of Contemplation, Hamilton Gardens The Sand and Stone Garden, Portland Japanese Garden These Zen gardens were chosen for their historic significance as well as their simplistic beauty. These gardens are meant to be experienced from a single point outside the garden walls, and are often thought of as still, petrified landscapes. Large stones often represent mountains or mountain formations or waterfalls, and the raked pebbles evoke watery waves. These rock gardens, also known as dry landscape gardens or karesansui contain elements that are intended to represent larger landscapes and inspire meditation and contemplation. Tiny lakes and islands covered with moss and precisely manicured grasses and shrubs combined with larger rocks and gravel beds intended to represent nature’s spirit on a more intimate scale.ĭuring the 14th century, Classical Zen gardens that were created in Rinzai Zen Buddhist temples began to showcase a simpler style incorporating large boulders and painstakingly groomed gravel. Japanese rock gardens were first developed during the 8th century and often mimicked the gardens of China’s Song Dynasty. ![]() Their counterparts in Japan continue to be associated with religious temples, as they have for more than a millennium. such sanctuaries remain largely the provenance of museums and botanic gardens. While a number of universities have Zen Gardens, in the U.S. It’s about an approach, about caring, and how you see things.As places of quiet contemplation and reflection, Japanese Zen gardens seem the perfect counterbalance to the stresses of an always-on, hyper-connected existence. One way is to do incremental cleaning and maintenance. “In Japan, only about 20 percent of the land is habitable, so people learn to care for their environment. Every time I walk in the garden I pick up a few pine needles, a bit of trash or a few leaves,” says Uchiyama. “It’s not so much about massive cleaning and pruning projects, but about constant small actions. Nothing is maintenance-free, and sometimes Japanese-style gardens involve even more maintenance than other gardens, they agree. Landscapers specializing in Japanese garden aesthetics say one persistent misconception is that these gardens are low-maintenance or even maintenance-free. “It’s very possible to create a wonderful Japanese garden using all native plants,” says Browne. The Japanese garden aesthetic “is very simple sounding, but it’s the most difficult thing I ever thought of in my life,” explains Powell.Īs for sustainability, there’s been a major shift in thinking about Japanese-style gardens away from specimen gardens, which tend to feel a bit like a botanical garden, and toward greater use of plants adapted to local environments. I think especially today, that idea of connecting the indoors and the outdoors is an aesthetic that a lot of people strive for,” he explains. “That is a big change from the U.S., where the landscaping was traditionally there to dress the exterior of the house, but was very disconnected from interior space. John Powell, a garden builder and pruning specialist from Weatherford, Texas, who trained in Japan, says he was attracted to Japanese gardens by “the seamless connection between interior and exterior space, which is evocative of the larger natural world, sometimes in a very compressed space.” Other aesthetic concepts he says are widely appreciated now are asymmetrical balance, and the beauty and importance of rocks, stones and boulders as the “bones” of a composition, which can then be filled in in a supportive way with plantings. “In Japan at least, it seems that there is one core idea that has come down over centuries, and that is the idea of bringing the beauty of nature into daily lives,” he says.
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