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Plants in the Japanese Garden—Evocations of Art and Nature

Plants & Gardens News Volume 21, Number 3 | Fall 2006/Winter 2007

by Adrian Bennett

The White Gravel and Black Pine Garden, at the Adachi Museum of Art, Yasugi, Japan.

Japanese gardens are first and foremost compositions. The contribution of plants to the overall composition of a garden takes precedence over their interest as botanical specimens or horticultural displays. But what kind of composition are we talking about? Well, a single theme threads through the historical development of the Japanese garden from the beginning, first articulated in the 11th-century Sakuteiki, perhaps the world's oldest garden design manual: "Think over the famous places of scenic beauty throughout the land, and...design your garden with the mood of harmony, modeling after the general air of such places." Japanese gardens reference natural scenes. Yet they are not "wild" or natural habitat gardens. Rather, like the landscape paintings of great artists, they depict nature poetically.

Of course, the interpretation of this mandate has varied in response to changing historical and cultural conditions over the more than 1,000 years of Japanese garden history. This history is too complex to consider in any detail here. Rather, let's look closely at the use of plants in two modern gardens, both built in the late 20th century, which utilize this tradition. The resulting compositions are both very beautiful yet quite distinct, and they produce different effects on the viewer.

"The Garden Is Like a Living Painting"

Zenkou Adachi (1891–1990), founder of the Adachi Museum of Art, located in the town of Yasugi, Shimane Prefecture, in the west of Japan, was often heard to utter this statement as he oversaw the construction of the museum's gardens in the 1970s and '80s. What kind of "living painting" did he seek to create?

The museum's gardens are numerous and varied. One of my favorites is the White Gravel and Black Pine Garden, which can be viewed from a stone-paved terrace just outside one wing of the museum. Adachi himself is said to have played a major role in the design of this garden. It was inspired by a landscape painting by Yokoyama Taikan (1868–1958), a leading proponent of the 20th-century Nihonga school, which combined traditional and modern styles. His Black Sand, Blue Pines depicts a group of pines sweeping at a diagonal across a sand dune, beyond which is seen a fragment of blue ocean and a pale-orange-tinted sky. But the garden is by no means a carbon copy of the painting.

The plant palette of the White Gravel and Black Pine Garden is small. We find only the evergreen, or Satsuki, azaleas (Rhododendron indicum), black pines (Pinus thunbergii), Japanese red pines (Pinus densiflora), a few Enkianthus perulatus scattered among the rocks, and a few ferns along the water's edge. Yet the effect is powerful, and the role of the plants is essential to that effect.

Because they are small-leaved and produce dense growth, Satsuki azaleas can be shaped into hemispherical forms of various sizes and grouped tightly together. We see this in the Adachi garden, in the foreground and middle ground of the composition, where the rounded forms intermingle with rough-textured, dark blue-black rocks. From the large pair of azaleas in the foreground, which help to frame the right side of the composition, the eye is led smoothly—but not too smoothly—down an intermittent, curving line toward the middle distance, where a group of four azaleas hover behind a large, flat-topped rock.

Just beyond and above this grouping, the focal point of a waterfall emerges at the apex of a triangle formed by the plants and rocks on both sides of the stream. Natural rocks and pruned shrubs: This interfacing and balancing of the natural and human-made is one of the aesthetic fundamentals of Japanese gardens.

In the middle ground of the composition, toward the righthand side, a transformation takes place. There is a large expanse of gravel of an off-white tint, punctuated by groups of short black pines leaning left and right as if tossed by winds. This is the closest approximation of Taikan's painting. The pines are regularly pruned and thinned and their crowns rounded, both to expose their finest branches to our view and to keep them from obscuring the background of the composition. Such pruning takes place in spring and fall, with regular clearing of dead needles and cones throughout the year.

The open white gravel area, along with the lawn off to its right, balances and complements the curving stream with its densely packed rough stones and smooth azaleas. It also leads the eye easily to the far distance, where we see a thickly wooded stretch of black pines. Though these trees too are clearly pruned, in particular to form rounded crowns, they are allowed to grow taller and more tightly together, creating a backdrop to the composition.

Above the undulating line of the trees—a line echoed throughout the entire scene—we see hills and mountains beyond the garden itself that are allowed to enter into the composition. The effect is that of the well-known shakkei, or "borrowed scenery," found in numerous gardens in Japan: It is as if the garden goes on forever. Someone standing on the terrace would never suspect that there is a busy highway just beyond that thick line of pines.

The White Gravel and Black Pine Garden is notable for the tightness of its design, in which many varied elements are brought together to create a powerful sense of harmony.

Nature's Power Evoked

The Fukada garden, in Okuizumo-cho.

Some of the most interesting gardens in Japan are found at private residences. Recently, I had the good fortune to visit a private garden at the house of Japanese garden landscaper Makoto Fukada, in Okuizumo-cho, a town deep in mountainous countryside about 40 kilometers south of Matsue, Shimane Prefecture's provincial capital. This garden, which extends the length of the house, was constructed in the mid- to late-20th century by Mr. Fukada's grandfather and father, who started the landscape business. What struck me right away was the stonework, and the relation of the plants to the stone.

Numerous large, rugged-looking stones of various shapes seem almost to have been tossed haphazardly into the space by violent natural forces. There are no azaleas here. Trees dominate the planting and include two weatherbeaten, cloud-pruned oaks (Quercus serrata) at the garden's southern edge, a tall crape myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica) leaning at a precarious angle in the northern section, and some Podocarpus macrophyllus, black pines, and red pines scattered among the rocks. These trees play a subsidiary role to the numerous yews (Taxus cuspidata), which grow wild in the local mountains but are cloud-pruned here. Yet the rocks are allowed to dominate the composition. The trees appear to have sprung up sporadically wherever they could find footholds among the rocks.

Right away, this garden made a strong impression on me. But in fact, I didn't really understand it until the next day, when I visited a river canyon in the local mountains called Oni-no-shita-burui ("the devil's shaking tongue"). There, white water rushes with a tremendous noise around and over huge boulders—some 10 to 15 meters wide—that ages ago tumbled from the tall cliffs into the river below. I was struck by the power of nature and its almost terrifying beauty.

It was then that I understood how the Fukada garden is a depiction of the natural forces of rock and water. Yet the garden is designed in a way that allows us to contemplate their power in relationship to our own humanity. The rocks are, upon closer inspection, not simply tossed in at random. In fact, from the veranda, they serve to form two sides of a rough-edged triangle, the veranda as the base and two tall upright stones at the far apex. There is an ordered geometry also in the placement of the lanterns. Because the artificially shaped forms of the stone lanterns attract the eye, they create sight vectors that help guide us through the composition. A sight line runs diagonally from the veranda to the tall Kasuga-style lantern on the left, and then along another diagonal to the low, "snow-viewing" lantern on the right, and from that to the semiobscured standing stones at the apex of the triangle. The trees partially obscure these taller rocks, softening their upward thrusting effect as well as blocking our view of the houses and hills beyond, thus "containing" or "framing" the garden within an enclosed space.

Are Japanese Gardens "Simple"?

The respective designers of these two gardens clearly modeled them with scenes of nature in mind, and yet the gardens have different effects on the viewer. Plants play rather different roles as well. Whereas the Adachi White Gravel and Black Pine Garden gives an immediate impression of a carefully crafted and maintained design, the Fukada garden seems to bring us closer to elemental forces of nature. The plants at the Adachi Museum, exquisitely placed and groomed, share center stage in this artful garden; the plants at Fukada, however, though pruned, struggle to assert themselves among the more dominant and primitive rocks. Not seen in the photo of this garden is a stone lantern whose round top has been broken in half—a reminder to us from the forces of nature of the impermanence of human creations.

People often tell me, Japanese included, that Japanese gardens are "simple." Well, yes and no. Cezanne once wrote, "Art is a harmony that runs parallel to nature," a description that might equally apply to the art of Japanese gardens. Are Cezanne's paintings "simple"? At their best, Japanese gardens incorporate plants into designs that are both natural and artificial, balanced yet asymmetrical; they juxtapose the formal and informal, and in general, use natural materials to evoke a profound "immaterial" experience. In doing so, they evoke a heightened sense of harmony with respect to our place in the natural world. Is that "simple"? A better word might be "subtle."