A Publication of the

Foundation

for Landscape Studies

Volume ıv | Number ı | Fall 2008A Journal of Place

Essays: The Long Life of the Japanese Garden 2Paula Deitz: Plum Blossoms: The Third Friend of Winter

Natsumi Nonaka: The Japanese Garden: The Art of Setting Stones

Marc Peter Keane: Listening to Stones

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: Tea and Sympathy: A Zen Approach to Landscape Gardening

Kendall H. Brown: Fair Japan: JapaneseGardens at American World’s Fairs, 1876–1940

Anthony Alofsin: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Aesthetics of Japan

Book Reviews 18Joseph Disponzio: The Sun King’s Garden: Louis XIV, André Le Nôtre and the Creation of the Garden of Versailles By Ian Thompson

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition By Robert Pogue Harrison

Calendar 22

Tour 23

Contributors 23

This issue ofSite/Lines focuseson the aestheticsof the Japanesegarden and its

influence in the West. Its ori-gins lie in the Chinese gar-den, which was importedinto the country in conjunc-tion with Buddhism in 552. Itis not surprising, however,that an indigenous gardentradition quite differentfrom that of China evolvedon this small, well-wateredisland, a country whose size,climate, and topography differ so greatly from thoseof its mainland neighbor.

Besides its debt toBuddhist philosophy, theJapanese garden owes some-thing to its ancient roots inthe native, nature-orientedreligion of Shintoism, whichascribes sanctity to certainobjects such as boulders,often framed by a torii, orgate, to mark them as a des-tination for pilgrims. Theinfluence of this indigenousspiritual tradition, combinedwith the tenets of Buddhismand a deep appreciation ofthe country’s scenic beauty,accounts for the use of nat-ural objects as primary mate-rials in the construction ofJapanese gardens.

During the Heian period(794–1185), still inspired byChinese models, gardenswere larger than they wouldlater become. They con-tained lakes with islandsconsisting of arrangementsof rocks, some intended tosuggest the form of a sym-bolically meaningful tortoiseor crane. Pavilions in thestyle known as shinden-zukuristood at the edge of thewater and served as viewingplatforms. In the eleventhcentury, the principles of Japanese garden designbecame codified in animportant manual of gardenrules known as the Sakuteiki.In an essay here on thisimportant treatise, NatsumiNonaka, an architectural his-torian specializing in land-scape subjects, explains thatthe art of setting stones isthe primary step in making aJapanese garden, as they arethe basic architectural ele-ments in creating its ponds,islands, and waterfalls.

Although its structure isderived principally from thecomposition of rocks andthe setting of stones, theJapanese garden is not with-out flowers. Azaleas, beauti-fully clipped to form flowingmounds, are admired by visitors today, and the sym-bolical presence in gardensof “the three friends of winter” – pine, bamboo, andplum – dates from Heian

times. Still observed is adeep-seated cultural tradi-tion of plum-blossom view-ing, which takes place atwinter’s end. Paula Deitzwrites about this third friendof winter in her narrative ofa recent trip to Japan, takenfor the sole purpose of participating in this annualritual.

By the Muromachi period(1333–1573), with the rise ofthe Zen sect of Buddhism,gardens became austere butcompelling compositionswithin small enclosed spaceswhose visual sphere wassometimes enlarged withoutside vistas of “borrowedscenery” (shakkei). The mainfunction of Zen monasticgardens was to foster medi-tation, and the art of settingof stones was a primarydesign consideration. Thechoice and placement ofstones were also importantin the creation of the “dewypath” (roji) in the tea gardenwhere the ritualized tea cere-mony (cha no yu) formulatedby Sen no Rikyu (1521–1591)was conducted in a smallstructure of elegantly rusticsimplicity. The tea ceremony,which is carried over to the present day, is meant toinduce a mood of wabi:appreciation of the beautyinherent in the craftsman-ship of humble spaces andarticles of everyday use.

In another essay, the land-scape architect and writer

Marc Peter Keane explainshow the Sakuteiki’s prescrip-tions regarding the setting ofstones, together with the Zen approach to gardendesign absorbed during hislong residency in Japan, have influenced his ownwork. Keane’s essay is com-plemented by a profile ofStephen Morrell, also a gar-den designer and Zen practi-tioner, who is the director ofthe John P. Humes JapaneseStroll Garden on the northshore of Long Island and theguiding spirit behind itsongoing creation and main-tenance.

The Japanese garden con-tinued to flourish during theEdo period (1603–1868) as adeeply traditional yet contin-ually innovative art form.But the impetus for changefrom within diminishedafter the appearance ofAmerican naval commanderCommodore Perry in TokyoBay in 1853. Understandably,as Japan opened its bordersto the outside world, it feltwith increasing intensity theinfluence of Western culture.As a corollary, the Westappreciated what it perceivedas Oriental exoticism, andthe replication of Japanese-garden style became a wide-spread vogue that continuesto the present. “Style” is theappropriate word inasmuchas the landscape idiom thatwas being purveyed by theJapanese was now a nationalcultural product. As KendallBrown points out, the

Japanese garden also becamean instrument of propagan-da in the hands of the coun-try’s imperial rulers at asuccession of nineteenth-and twentieth-centuryworld’s fairs. And despite theWest’s opposition to a mili-tant Japan during the firsthalf of the twentieth century,the popularity of the Japan-ese garden abroad did not wane. Today there are an estimated 250 publicJapanese gardens in at least53 countries.

The Japanese garden didnot merely spawn replica-tions of its basic vocabularyof forms; it inspired modernarchitects in ways that rein-forced their radical breakfrom Beaux-Arts neoclassi-cism, use of ornament, anddependence on an eclecticmélange of various Europeanstyles. While European modernists for the most partsought new forms of expres-sion through machine technology, they were never-theless influenced to adegree by the minimalistelegance of Japanese archi-tecture. In the United States,Frank Lloyd Wright forged adistinctly American form ofmodernism influenced byJapanese craft traditions. Hisvision incorporated respectfor materials, underlyingrestraint, asymmetrical com-position, consideration ofspatial flow, and integration

of interior and exterior. Thepreeminent Wright scholarAnthony Alofsin maintainsin his essay that Wright wasinspired as much by gardensas by architecture during his1905 trip to Japan. The pho-tographs that Wright took onthat trip, which Alofsin earli-er published as a book (FrankLloyd Wright’s Fifty Views ofJapan: The 1905 Photo Album),demonstrate that Wright did not focus on the templestructures in the famousmonastery gardens of Kyotoindependently of their rela-tionship to the designedlandscapes around them.

To broaden our under-standing of the importanceof the Japanese garden as acultural expression in itsown right and also as aninfluence on designers in theWest, the Foundation forLandscape Studies is offeringa study tour entitled “In theFootsteps of Frank LloydWright: The Gardens ofJapan” in spring 2009. Priorto that, the California StateUniversity, Long Beach, ishosting an internationalconference on Japanese gar-dens outside Japan fromMarch 26 to 29, 2009. Ourreaders will find more infor-mation on these events inthis issue.

Good green wishes,

Elizabeth Barlow RogersEditor

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Letter from the Editor

On the Cover:

Hibiya Park, Tokyo, Japan.

Plum Blossoms: The Third Friend of Winter

As one who marks the seasons with rituals of herown, I have long been drawn to Japan, where theentire culture is attentive to nature and its cyclicaladornments. With the same pleasure and regret forthe ephemerality of cherry blossoms and the scarlet

hues of autumnal maples, I have cherished the experience ofwalking the paths of temple and shrine gardens with hun-dreds of others, making a pilgrimage through time. In 1999,while visiting Kamakura in May, the season of clipped azaleas,I first discovered the temple Hokai-ji and its spectacular alléeof glossy green trees. When I learned they were plum trees, Imade a mental note to return someday to see them in bloom.

In Japan, the plum tree flowers just as winter tantalizinglyheralds spring. More than 350 varieties of flowering plum(Prunus mume) with white, red, or pink blossoms bloom fromlate January through March, making it difficult to pinpoint anoptimum moment for viewing. As the years passed, I insteadencountered plum trees mostly through art – primarily on thefour sliding door panels or fusuma installed in the shoin orJapanese reception room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.The panels are collectively titled The Old Plum and attributedto Kano Sansetsu, c. 1545; I began visiting them regularly tomarvel at the tree’s thickly gnarled trunk, crooked branches,and wispy white blossoms set against gold leaf. And in my cat-alogue of Rimpa art from the Idemitsu Collection in Tokyo, Ifrequently study the famous pair of six-fold screens of blos-soming red and white plum trees, attributed to Ogata Korinand painted around 1712. In quintessential Japanese style, thebranches of the red plum twist and turn, contrasting with thelinear branch of white. Both are starkly etched into a goldbackground above a stylized river in black.

In January this year, a winter exhibition at the Kaikodogallery in New York entitled “Let It Snow” featured a nine-teenth-century hanging scroll by Okada Tamechika, FujiwaraKinto with Blossoming Plum. Under the snow-laden branches ofa red plum, a portly imperial official in black robe and head-dress holds a sprig of plum blossoms and a fan. He is compos-

ing a poem for the emperor as he shuffles back to courtthrough drifts of snow. An irresistible image: plum blossomsin snow. I flew to Japan on February 10 and found a countrycelebrating plum blossoms in every aspect of daily life.

I began my pilgrimage at the Hatakeyama MemorialMuseum of Fine Art in Tokyo, founded in 1964 by IsseyHatakeyama, who collected unusual tea ceremony utensils andrelated art objects with sea-sonal themes that are dis-played at appropriate times.In the winter exhibition, fea-turing plum blossoms andcamellias, the vigor andbeauty of the three friends ofwinter traditionally depictedtogether – pine, bamboo, and plum – were captured inunderglaze blue on a seven-teenth-century bowl and lidfrom the Ming Dynasty in China. This delicate bowlwas a reminder that theplum tree was a native ofChina before it arrived inJapan in the seventh century.

In one of the twelvepaintings of birds and flow-ers by Sakai Hoitsu from theEdo period, a bright pinkcamellia is entwined in awhite plum with a Japanesenightingale poised on itsbough. Unlike cherry blos-soms, which burst intoflower simultaneously, theplum blooms graduallyalong a branch and is por-

trayed in art with both full five-petaled blossoms and tightbuds at the end of each twig. This iconography establishes anair of expectation, of future potential – the same sensation Ifelt later standing in groves of plums. Even on a small ceramicincense burner on view by Ogata Kenzan (Ogata Korin’s broth-er), the decoration of a heavy twisted branch combines fullwhite blossoms with buds. As is customary, the visit to the

museum concluded with bowls of green teawhipped to a froth and sweets in the shape ofplum blossoms. Each guest held a different bowlwith individual characteristics worth studying.

Little preparation for this voyage wasrequired. My friends in Japan embraced myquest, taking me to view plum blossoms in sever-al regions and milieu. Amy Katoh, whose booksand Tokyo store, Blue & White, seek to preservetraditional rural crafts and the indigenous indigoculture, had prepared for us, in her inimitablestyle, a bright pink-and-white booklet entitledPickled Plums & Friends. Among stenciled designsof plum blossoms for yukata (a Japanese handtowel cum sweat band) and evocative haiku is amélange of history, customs, and recipes, espe-cially for the tasty pickled plums called umeboshi.(A popular Japanese proverb – “Pickled ume andfriends, the older, the better” – gave Amy thetitle.) Here one learns that in the relatively peace-ful Edo period, the crossing of natural varietiesyielded a wide variety of plums with fruits thatare smaller and more tart than their European orAmerican counterparts. Some large orchards,planted for the fruit alone, are dazzling when inbloom.

Armed with historical and horticultural infor-mation, I set out with Amy for the ShimanePrefecture, on the Sea of Japan, and the town ofOmori, with its narrow streets of restored wood-en houses, shops, and shrines along a river valleynorth of the famous Iwami Ginzan silver mine.Last year the entire region, which dates to the sixteenth century, was designated a UNESCO

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The Long Life of the Japanese Garden

Fujiwara Kinto with Blossoming Pine

by Okada Tamechika (1823–1864),

ink and color on silk, 38 1/2 x 13 in.

Courtesy of Kaikodo.

World Heritage Site. We stayed with her friends the Matsubesin their home, Abe Ke, a rambling Japanese courtyard house,one of the largest in town. Its succession of rooms separatedby shoji screens and fusuma surrounds interior courtyard gar-dens with verandas. Shoes were removed and placed on thepacked dirt floor of the entrance hall.

During the first night, I left the warmth of my futon bedand slid open the inner screen and an outer glass one to watcha heavy snowfall on the courtyard garden with its stone snowlantern. The next morning, I walked into the front garden andthere, gnarled and stunted with age, was a white plum tree inblossom with glistening snow piled high on its branches andin its crevices. This was the reason I had come to Japan. Later Iwould see many others, planted along the river that mean-dered through the town under high arched bridges. Camelliahedges with red blossoms were equally encrusted with snow.

Indoors, outdoors, in nature and in art, the plum seemedubiquitous. During the day, we visited the Matsubes’ store,Gungendo, managed by their daughter, Yukiko. Installed in theentrance was a seasonal display of blue and white ribbonstreamers with stylized paper plum blossoms. Immediatelyinside there was a pink obi with a plum blossom design. At thehouse itself, where Tomi Matsube oversees a Life Style StudyCenter, ceramic jars with a few sprigs of plum blossoms wereplaced strategically for the best aesthetic effect. And along thewintry town streets, cut-off bamboo stalks tied to the exteriorlatticework of houses were filled with plum blossoms.

One afternoon, we made an excursion to view a nearby drygarden with exquisitely pruned trees and clipped shrubs alonga river of stones. We also visited the Izumo Taisha Shrine, theoldest Shinto shrine in Japan, with its signature crossed barge-boards at the peak of the gabled roof. On the way back, bychance, in an enclave of old houses with tiled roofs, we passedby a classic vignette of the season: a massive plum tree withdark pink blossoms at the edge of a rice field covered in snow.And the snow continued to fall.

Dinner at a long table in the commodious kitchen of Abehouse was a communal, neighborly affair. For the occasion,bottles of plum wine were opened and shared with guests. Onwooden shelves in an immense storeroom behind the kitchenstood large jars of umeboshi from the crop of the previous

summer. Visitors to the Study Center are encouraged to bor-row an in-house digital camera to record images of the townas a visual essay of their own impressions. One of the guestsfrom Osaka, Aki Izuhara, showed me the sequence of pho-tographs she had made in the fresh snow, including one of thegnarled plum tree. Since I choose to describe images only innotes, she generously offered me a disk of her photographs asa souvenir.

We then left these wintry scenes behind, continuing on toKagoshima, on Japan’s southernmost island of Kyushu. Therewe visited Kobo Shobu, a residential craft center where Downsyndrome and autistic adults create traditional and originalJapanese crafts. The change in temperature was striking. Thedrive into the city was lined with what we dubbed “corduroy”tea fields after the distinctive green rows of tea plants. Theplum trees in this warmer clime were in full bloom; our host,Kobu Shobu’s director, was particularly proud of the whiteplum that loomed over his garden. We saw the tree at twilight,which gave it an eerie glow.

The next day we traveled to a mountainside on the coastoverlooking a large expanse of bay. We looked out towardJapan’s dramatic volcano, Sakurajima: deep green slopes on apeninsula, with wisps of steam rising from the crater. In asweeping garden on our side, plum trees with pale pink blos-soms were interspersed among palm trees in the foreground, asubtropical view.

Back in Tokyo, my plum blossom walks became more seri-ous under the guidance of the writer Sumiko Enbutsu, authormost recently of A Flower Lover’s Guide to Tokyo: 40 Walks for AllSeasons. In it, she tells the story of the ninth-century Kyotoscholar-statesman Sugawara Michizane, much favored at courtfor his command of Chinese classics and poetry in this earlyperiod of Japanese literature. Falsely charged by rivals, he wasexiled to Kyushu in despair, leaving his beloved pink plumtree with this farewell poem: “When the east wind blows, / emitthy perfume, plum-blossom; / Because thy master is away, / forget not the spring.”

His death soon thereafter was followed by a stream of nat-ural disasters bringing about his swift posthumous restitutionand deification as Tenjin, a “god of heaven.” Shrines dedicatedto him and planted with plum trees are found all over Japan.As the first blooming of plums coincides with the dates ofuniversity entrance exams in January, aspirants who seek sup-port from this scholarly god hang thousands of woodenplaques at the shrines, inscribed with wishes for success.Examination results are announced around the period of fullbloom.

On a Saturday morning, Sumiko gathered a few friends tojoin the throngs visiting plum gardens at Zen temples in theeastern section of Kamakura. (A former capital of Japan[1185–1333], today Kamakura is a residential quarter on SagamiBay, southwest of Tokyo.) While the rest of the city was outdoing the weekly shopping, a steady stream of visitors woundthrough the neighborhoods that separate the temples. Privategardens yielded plum blossoms in all hues – some weeping to the ground – plus red camellias and pine trees pruned intoexotic forms. Sometimes the path followed the banks of theNamerigawa River.

For anyone who treasures Saiho-ji, the moss garden inKyoto, the visit to Zuisen-ji in Kamakura is revealing. MusoSoseki, who designed Saiho-ji’s lush landscape as the temple’sfirst abbot in 1339, began designing in Kamakura, twelve years earlier, as the first priest at Zuisen-ji. Beyond the templeand its plum trees, Muso carved out caverns at the base of a steep cliff above a pond. In his time, a dramatic waterfall cas-caded over the cliff and into the pond below, completing the composition, but even today the dark caverns in the rock –with water below and sky above – are an arresting sight.

Though the grounds of the temples we visited were notextensive, each was distinctive in the color and arrangement ofits plum trees and the preservation of its landscaped features.At the entrance to Sugimoto-dera, the oldest temple inKamakura, an ancient white plum was supported by stakes inthe manner the Japanese do so artfully. A pink plum in thesame grouping was set off by a yellow witch hazel that bloomedsimultaneously. Well-placed stepping stones surrounded thethatched-roofed temple, and to the side stood a small pavilionwith effigies of Buddha wearing ritualistic bibs made of color-fully designed textiles. Of Hokoku-ji, one remembers thewoven bamboo fence, the dark pink plum near the entrance,the raked gravel and camellia trees leading to a dark and mys-terious bamboo grove, like a forest of organ pipes, and cavesagain in an overhanging cliff. And of Jomyo-ji, the roundedforms of tea hedges surrounding the gardens and the combi-nation of white, pink, and red plums gradually coming intobloom.

We climbed the Genjiyama Hill overlooking Sagami Bay forlunch in an old farmhouse in the sturdy architectural styledeveloped for northern regions. The farmhouse had been relo-

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cated here and restored, its massive beams and loft-like upperrooms creating a sense of amplitude and purpose.

Rested, we moved on to Hokai-ji, and there I finallyachieved the fulfillment of the wish I’d first had on that Mayvisit, years earlier: the overarching entrance allée of plum treesbore myriad buds and fragrant pink blossoms. Further alongstood a majestic weeping plum with wooden supports thatappeared integral to its natural form. Other images I stillrecall: the straw hats of the gardeners, and a large ceramic bell.We ended at the great Shinto shrine of Tsurugaoko Hachimanwith the double lotus ponds that were in flower on my earliervisit. The shrine is grander and more ornate than the temples,and the plum blossoms on either side of the steep stairwayleading up to it were equally impressive.

Sumiko and Amy teamed up to plan my last day, in HinoCity, on the western outskirts of Tokyo. The highlight wouldbe a visit to Keio Mogusa-en Garden (No. 37 in Sumiko’s book).Afterwards we would attend the fire ritual at Takahata Fudo, anearby temple of esoteric Buddhism, and visit the antiquesfair on the temple grounds (a natural coupling in Japan). As weapproached the garden, graphics of plum blossoms on pink-and-white banners attached to streetlight poles announced itsnearby presence. But nothing prepared me for what I saw as Iascended the stone steps and emerged from a wooded hillside:eight hundred plum trees of every pastel hue and at variousstages of bloom. In the middle of the garden, by a thatched-roofed farmhouse, stood an old white plum that had beenplanted there by a nun three hundred years ago. Because plumtrees are pruned and hacked back to create fuller blooms, thebranches develop in contorted directions like the tree in theMet fusuma or the one in the Korin screen. Over the course oftime – they can live for centuries – they develop their pic-turesque gnarled trunks.

Originally the site of a temple called Shoren-an, the land-scaping here is enhanced by ponds that reflect the trees, andbridges guide visitors along a circuitous route over the waterfor a full experience of the garden. Interspersed pines, elegant-ly pruned into cloud formations, are decoratively protected by taut ropes – like the ribs of bamboo umbrellas, Sumikosays, but with the practical purpose of preventing accumulatedsnowfall. This garden was the pinnacle of plums.

When we arrived later for the fire ceremony in the four-teenth-century, smoke-blackened Fudo Hall, just a few placeswere left inside, and we squeezed in before the incantationsbegan. A central fire had been lit for the burning of stacks of

prayer sticks, seeds and beans, and other plants. Carefullytended by the priest, the fire conveyed a sense of purification.After the congregants rose to circle between the fire and thecentral altar to leave monetary donations, they settled back onthe floor, and the priest began to speak. Even though I do notknow Japanese, his tone expressed an openness to the commu-nal aspects of the ceremony, and he had special words for amother holding an infant, beautifully dressed as if for a bap-tism of sorts.

Once outside, we mingled among the flea market mer-chants and their assortment of antiques laid out on theground or on low shelves. Amy, as usual, sought out blue andwhite ceramics and textiles. I wandered over to a rack of oldkimonos, always in ample supply since clothes are discarded atdeath in Japan. Rummaging through, I was intrigued by onethe merchant said was from the 1950s. Against a solid groundthe color of rosé, a design in white combined sprigs of plumblossom – both flowers and buds – with bouquets of autumnalchrysanthemums. It is unusual in Japan to mix seasons in adesign, since women wear only what is appropriate to the sea-son. Yet there was its message: the first and last flowers tobloom in the year. I purchased it for five dollars.

We moved on to the rustic Sanko-in convent for a vegetari-an lunch in the Take-no-Gosho style of Kyoto. We were servedexquisitely presented steamed turnips, potatoes, and seaweed,reconstituted tofu and other delicacies; the carrots wereshaped into five-petaled plum blossoms. And for our finalstop, we passed by the Jindai-ji temple for a charming view ofits thatched front gate flanked by pink and white plum trees.That evening, at dinner with Amy at Shabusen in the Ginza,the dessert, yoshino-koubai, was the real thing: a Japanese plum, slow-cooked in honey and served in a glass of clear jelly.

Over the long season of the plum’s flowering, as winterreleases its hold on the land, these rituals surrounding itsblossoms are performed countrywide, an integral part of Japan’s cultural identity. I will continue to share in them by wearing the jacket I had made from my plum-blossomkimono – a kimono another woman wore long ago, to celebratethe coming of spring and its sustained pleasures of “one early, one later.” – Paula Deitz

The Japanese Garden: The Art of Setting Stones

The earliest known Japanese treatise on garden mak-ing is generally attributed to Tachibana noToshitsuna (1028–94). The author was a nobleman,the son of an imperial regent, and he intended histreatise for the aristocracy, who were the main

clients in the Heian period (794–1185). Without illustrationsand originally untitled, the treatise was the product of a longoral tradition that had been passed down through generationsof gardeners. The oldest surviving version of the text, in theform of manuscript scrolls, dates from the Kamakura period(1185–1336), when it was referred to as Senzai-hisho (The SecretText of Gardens). In the Edo period (1603–1868), the treatiseacquired the title Sakuteiki (The Book of Gardening).

The treatise opens with the topical heading Ishi wo tatenkoto (The art of setting stones). Ishi is the Japanese word forstone, and the expression ishi wo taten koto not only refers tohow stones should be placed in relation to one another in agarden, but also to the act of making the garden itself. Threebasic principles for setting stones are postulated: follow therules of nature; study the examples of past masters; and modeldesigns after famous landscapes. A detailed explanation fol-lows on how to construct ponds, islands, and waterfalls usingstones.

The recurrent mention in the Sakuteiki of the importance ofperforming such tasks “according to the will or desire ofstones” (ishi no kowan ni shitagaite) testifies that their treatmentwas both central and essential. As Josiah Conder observed perceptively in Landscape Gardening in Japan (1893), the impor-tance attached to stones, rocks, and boulders is a striking char-acteristic of Japanese gardens. Nowhere in the Western worlddo we find gardens in which simple stones and rocks play sosignificant a role in the design and making of the garden.

The value they are accorded presumably derives from anolder belief in sacred stones called iwakura, boulders usedsince ancient times as prayer sites and usually located inmountains. Each was seen as containing a god or as being alink to the world of the gods. The author of the Sakuteiki andhis contemporaries would have perceived stones as havingsome kind of will or desire, if not a spirit or life of their own.Although this animism may no longer be widespread in ourage, the use of stones as a central component in Japanese gar-den design has survived unchanged. With maximum exploita-tion of their natural texture, stones remain an aesthetic devicehighly expressive of a subtle yet powerful beauty.

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Pond gardensThe pond garden is the oldest garden type found in Japaneselandscape history. The garden of Daikaku-ji Temple (834) in west Kyoto is the oldest artificial garden in Japan, and itsOsawa Pond is the most complete Heian garden lake to survive. This is a chisen-shuyu-style garden – a pond garden tobe enjoyed from a boat. The site was originally a rikyu (literally,a “detached palace,” a secondary imperial palace apart from the official one), made up of a Shinden-style mansion and agarden with a large pond. Shinden was the preferred architec-tural style among the Heian aristocracy. Residences consistedof a main building facing south, several subsidiary buildingsconnected by covered corridors, and a garden with a pond andfishing pavilions. As boating accompanied by musical enter-tainments and moon-viewing were popular pastimes for Heiannobles, the Osawa Pond was placed southeast of the buildingcomplex so that the moon could be viewed rising over thewater.

Osawa Pond was constructed by damming a natural streamto the northeast of the property, conforming to the theory pro-posed in the Sakuteiki that water should flow into a pond fromthe northeast and flow out from the southwest. (China’s lovelyLake Dongting Hu in Hunan province provided the model.) Atthe pond’s northern end are two small islands named Tenjin-jima and Kiku-ga-shima. Between them several stone isletsappear in a straight line, imitating junks anchored in a harbor.Along the stream to the north of the Pond is a stone arrange-ment referred to as “Nakoso waterfall,” named after the Nakosocheckpoint in northern Japan, which is a well-known topos inmedieval Japanese poetry. Here rocks and stones form small-scale versions of famous natural landscapes from China orJapan in a technique called shukkei (miniature landscape).

The garden of Tenryu-ji (1339), which was built five hundredyears later in the river resort of Arashiyama in west Kyoto, hasa pond too small for boating; it is instead a chisen-kaiyu-stylegarden – a pond garden to be enjoyed by strolling. This gardencontains the earliest example of shakkei (borrowed scenery), the technique of visually incorporating into a garden naturalfeatures lying beyond its boundaries. Originally the distantprospect of two hills, Kameyama and Arashiyama, was part ofthe garden landscape, although overgrown trees now obscurethe view.

The Zen priest Muso Soseki (1275–1351) designed this gardenon the site of a former rikyu. Emperor Godaigo (1288–1339),

who lived there as a child, successfully rebelled against theKamakura shogunate to restore imperial power, but his reignwas short-lived. His general Ashikaga Takauji betrayed andbanished him, and established a new military shogunate inKyoto. In 1339 Emperor Godaigo died in exile, and soon afterMuso Soseki dreamed that the emperor, in the form of a gold-en dragon, rose out of the river in Arashiyama. Muso Sosekiconvinced Takauji to convert the Arashiyama detached palaceinto a temple to appease the spirit of the late emperor; thepriest was then charged with the remodeling of the garden.Versed in Chinese art and culture, and inspired by the blackink paintings of the Song dynasty, Muso Soseki was one of thefirst to advocate the idea that gardens could be used as an aidto Zen meditation.

The pond at Tenryu-ji provided an ideal setting for stonearrangements featuring Chinese classical iconography.Designed to be viewed across the pond from the main build-ing, beyond a bridge made of three slabs of stone, a largestanding rock forms the base of a dry waterfall known asRyumon baku (Dragon Gate waterfall). Above and slightly to theleft of the base rock is a curved stone vaguely resembling alarge fish. This stone is called the carp stone because it sug-gests a carp struggling against the current. It is associated withthe old Chinese belief that a carp, after successfully ascendingthe Yellow River Gorge at Lung Men (Dragon Gate), will betransformed into a dragon. In China, “to pass the DragonGate” was a metaphor for passing the qualifying examinationsfor government service. In Japan, the carp attempting to climbthe waterfall became a metaphor of Zen enlightenmentthrough self-training and meditation.

Near the carp is an islet made of seven stones. This stonegrouping alludes to the mythic mountain island in the EastChina Sea called Horai Island (named after the yomogi plantthat flourishes in uninhabited places). Horai Island was theabode of the sen-nin or hermit of Chinese legend who leads asolitary life in the mountains, having achieved transcendentalwisdom and immortality. This stone grouping became afavorite garden motif in Japan, frequently repeated in latergardens.

The garden at Tenryu-ji represents the transitional stagefrom Heian pond gardens. In addition to imitating naturallandscapes, the stones’ arrangements were associated withmoralistic meanings. No longer thought of as purely orna-mental elements recreating beautiful scenery that gave plea-sure to the senses, they carried spiritual connotations invitingthe viewer to meditation. The spiritual symbolism of stoneswould be a central feature of dry landscape gardens in the cen-turies to come.

Karesansui (dry landscape) gardensIn the Muromachi era (1336–1573), a period dominated by mili-tary rule, priests and warriors preferred symbolic waterscapes.Influenced by Zen thinking and Chinese Song dynasty land-scape paintings, the era’s gardens became increasingly abstractin design. In stark contrast to Western gardens, in which waterand vegetation were indispensable components, these Japanesegardens could do without either. A garden without water iscalled a karesansui. Its main components are stone and moss,with gravel or sand used occasionally to fill in voids. The term“karesansui” was first used in the Sakuteiki, designating a drylandscape portion of a larger garden within which one couldenter and move around. In the Muromachi era, however, itcame to mean a stone garden that was a place for contempla-tion to be viewed exclusively from the interior of an adjoiningbuilding. Despite its paucity of materials and simplicity ofdesign, the karesansui garden can evoke deep feelings andprofound philosophical ideas.

Daisen-in, a subtemple in the large temple complex ofDaitoku-ji (1315) in north Kyoto, features a typical karesansuigarden dating from 1509. It was designed to be viewed from ashoin, a small room in a temple used as a study, featuring atokonoma (alcove), chigaidana (staggered shelves), and tsuke-shoin (built-in desk) . Later shoins were incorporated in resi-dences of the ruling warrior class, and the term “Shoin-style”came to designate the architectural style of warrior mansions.

In the garden at Daisen-in is a pair of large rocks that standupright, one slightly taller than the other; together, they repre-sent a monumental waterfall. The ground is covered withwhite gravel raked in flowing patterns to represent a river andan ocean. The “water” precipitates down the cascade, forms ariver that flows under bridges and around islands, and finallyfinds its way into the ocean. The itinerary of the water can beseen as an allegorical trajectory of human life. From waterfallto river, from river to sea, the watercourse widens as it moves

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overtly referring to a particu-lar scene in nature or theclassical literary past, thestones remain vaguely andobliquely allusive. Proposedinterpretations are as diverseas “a bird’s-eye view of asymbolic ocean dotted withislands,” or “a mother tiger and cubs crossing thesea.” The contemporaryarchitect Arata Isozaki (1931–)remarked that the layout ofthe stones was in accordancewith the golden ratio. Butconsidering the fundamentalZen concepts of enlighten-ment through meditationand the experience of noth-ingness, the stones may sym-bolize nothing more than an invitation to contemplatethe landscape and its possi-ble meanings. Or they maybe an ultimate expression of

Muromachi aesthetics of yugen (subtle profundity) and yohakuno bi (the beauty of empty space). In any case, the minimalistand monochromatic stone garden at Ryoan-ji features a pureform and a reductive aesthetic that would have significantrepercussions in art and architecture. Isamu Noguchi referredto his sunken garden for the Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza inNew York (1961–64) as “my Ryoan-ji.”

Roji (tea garden)The Momoyama era (1573–1603) saw the development of twoopposing trends in garden making: on the one hand, gardensfeaturing monumental stone arrangements displaying the lav-ish opulence of costly stones, exemplified by the garden atDaigo-Sampoh-in in southeast Kyoto (1589); on the other hand,the understated roji (literally “dewy path” but meaning “tea gar-den”) featuring a compressed rustic landscape with restraineduse of stone ornaments. Sado (the tea ceremony), which estab-lished itself in Japan towards the end of the sixteenth century,gave birth to this latter type.

Tea drinking had its origins in China, but its transforma-tion into a ritual embracing simplicity and restraint was apurely Japanese invention, and so, too, was the roji. Unlike thetraditional gardens created to be enjoyed in their own right,the roji was a transitional space leading from the entry gate tothe teahouse, often bordered by a simple fence of bambootwigs and adorned with plants of restrained color. The tea-house was a modest grass-thatched hut with an interior spacemeasuring only 4½ tatami mats (7.3 square meters). Spiritualitywas the key concept of the roji, one that Sen no Rikyu(1522–91), tea master of the Momoyama era, characterized as“the spiritual purity of the mind that has taken leave of allworldly toil and defilement.”

Simplicity pervades the design of the roji. Its characteristicfeature lies in the stones combining both utilitarian and decorative functions: tobi-ishi (stepping stones), tsukubai(hand-washing basins), and ishi-doro (stone lanterns). Tsukubai(literally a place where one has to bend down) was the stonebasin where visitors washed hands and purified themselvesbefore entering the teahouse. Ishi-doro were placed along theroji to light the path for nocturnal tea ceremonies. They weresoon adapted as ornaments in religious and secular gardens,and continue to adorn them to this day. The tobi-ishi wereoriginally intended to protect the moss and to lead the visitortowards the teahouse, but they gradually gained an aestheticcharacterized by the concepts of wabi (refined austerity) andsabi (similar in meaning to wabi; subdued taste).

The stones were selected for their shapes, colors, and sur-face textures. Uniformity or unity was not the issue; subtlediversities and irregularities among them added to the tastefulrusticity of the small garden space. In the roji of Fushin-an(1594) at the Omote Senke tea school in Kyoto, the tobi-ishi areset in moss in a deliberately oblique or winding course. AtKoho-an garden (1621), designed by Kobori Enshu (1579–1647)in Daitoku-ji, Kyoto, the tobi-ishi are also set among graveland moss in a slightly sinuous way. These stones are meant tomanipulate the pace of the visitors, obliging them to slowdown, look around, and see things that they would have passedby in everyday life. The tobi-ishi are thus intended to increasevisitors’ consciousness of the quotidian and the ordinary andguide them toward a revaluation of the importance of smalldaily activities. They have proved an enduring feature ofJapanese gardens up to the present.

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along its route, just as ourperspective should broadenas we age. The water flowingunder bridges and aroundseveral rocks may representthe surmounting of obsta-cles one encounters duringthe course of life. The seasuggests Mother Nature, thefinal destination of life’s voy-age.

The garden of Ryoan-ji(1619–80) in north Kyoto isthe most famous karesansuigarden in Japan. The site wasa former aristocratic estatethat was converted into aZen temple in 1450. The dat-ing of the stone garden iscontroversial, but the con-sensus is that it was original-ly created in the fifteenthcentury; its present formdates from the Edo period.

Enclosed on three sidesby walls and on the fourthside by a wooden verandafrom which visitors can contemplate the stone arrangements,the rectangular garden covered with white sand measures only25 by 10 meters. Out of this sand rise fifteen stones arrangedsuccessively from the right in groups of three, two, three, two,and five. The sand is raked in a pattern of straight lines run-ning almost the full length of the garden, except around thestones, where it is raked in concentric circles.

Unlike the powerful rocks that create a dynamic waterscapein the garden at Daisen-in, the stones at Ryoan-ji are not par-ticularly distinctive in terms of shape, size, or color. Somebarely rise above the ground. The emphasis is not on the indi-vidual stones but rather on their relative sizes and shapes,their combination in groups, and their spatial relationships toeach other and the raked sand around them. Instead of

Stone garden at Ryoan-ji.

Stroll gardensKatsura Rikyu (1620–45) is a sublime synthesis of the Japanesegarden aesthetics hitherto described. This vast property(58,000 square meters) in southwest Kyoto was a former HeianShinden-style mansion estate, remodeled in the early Edoperiod into a full-scale garden for strolling – a fourth gardentype – and dotted with residential buildings and teahouses.

The residential buildings – the Old Shoin, the MiddleShoin, and the New Palace – are constructed in Sukiya (tea-house) style. Their rustic simplicity, devoid of ornamentation,was much admired by German architect Bruno Taut in Housesand People of Japan (1937). The three buildings are intercon-nected in a zigzag gankou (geese-in-flight) formation, engagingthe stroller in a remarkable kinesthetic experience. The tea-houses are situated at scenic spots around the pond, linked bypaths of stepping stones. A sequence of garden spaces unrollsin front of the visitor who follows the paths, creating unex-pected surprises and offering a constantly changing view. Asone zigzags toward the buildings or follows the intricate con-tours of the pond with its numerous peninsulas and bays, aseries of vistas are alternately hidden and then revealed in atechnique called mie-gakure (hide-and-reveal).

At Katsura, three kinds of tobi-ishi are used: shin (formal),gyo (semi-formal), and so (informal). The path leading to thefront entrance of the Old Shoin is composed entirely of artifi-cial stone slabs cut in geometrical shapes, shin no tobi-ishi. Thepath in front of the bench pavilion in the garden is a combi-nation of artificially cut slabs and small natural stones, gyo notobi-ishi. The path leading to the Shoi-ken teahouse is com-posed entirely of small natural stones called so no tobi-ishi.Thus the stepping stones themselves create a remarkably com-plex and beautiful effect. No other gardens display such a vari-ety of pleasing ground patterns as those at Katsura. As Tautobserved, the Japanese may indeed have a tendency, instead oflooking upwards, to lower their gaze, as their sedentary poseon tatami has accustomed them to do so.

According to Taut, Katsura Rikyu is the highest achieve-ment of Japanese aesthetic taste – a happy blend of the expan-siveness of Heian pond gardens, the stark simplicity of Zenaesthetics, and the subtle and restrained elegance of the worldof tea. The exquisite use of stones at Katsura, which enrichesour physical and visual experience of space, remains unparal-leled in Japanese landscape history.

Modern stone gardensA number of modern landscape architects continue to experi-ment with the use of stones. Mirei Shigemori (1896–1975), alandscape architect and scholar who trained in painting,flower arrangement, and the art of the tea ceremony, creatednumerous dry landscape gardens that are both novel yet tradi-tional in design. Among other projects, he collaborated withIsamu Noguchi in choosing stones for the UNESCO garden inParis.

Shigemori’s masterpiece, the gardens at Tofuku-ji in Kyoto(1939), consists of four independent parts. In the south garden,four stone groupings amidst white sand represent four mythicislands of Chinese legend (Hojo, Horai, Eishu, and Koryo), andfive moss-covered mounds symbolize the five Zen sects ofKyoto. In the west garden, stone curbs create a checkerboard

grid pattern that is filled inwith white sand and shaped

azaleas. The north garden contains the famous grid of squarestones embedded in green moss; it was inspired by the gridpattern on the sliding doors in the teahouses at Katsura Rikyuand Shugakuin Rikyu. In the east garden, stones placed in acloud-shaped area of white sand represent the constellation ofthe Big Dipper.

Shunmyo Masuno (1953–), a Zen priest and landscape archi-tect, has published widely on garden design and creatednumerous gardens in Japan and abroad. His overseas worksinclude the Zen garden at the Canadian Museum of Civiliza-tion in Ottawa (1995), Taunustor Japan Center in Frankfurt(1996), the Japanese garden at Berlin Marzahn Erholungspark(2003), and the garden of the University of Bergen, Norway(2003). Of his many landscape architecture projects withinJapan, the garden of the Cerulean Tower Tokyu Hotel in Tokyo(2001) is considered among the most powerful. Outside thelounge area is a curving terrace of pale granite ledges lit byconcealed lighting. These symbolize waves rolling towards ashore, represented by a “beach” of pebbles and boulders.Around the corner is another stone garden made of slabs ofdarker granite, some with chiseled surfaces, some polished.

Other noteworthy examples of modern landscape architec-ture featuring stones are the Stone Plaza in Tochigi(1996–2000) and the Water/Glass House in Atami (1998), bothby Kengo Kuma (1954–), and private gardens in Kyoto byAtsushi Akenuki (1947–), including that of the TsuruyaYoshinobu cake shop. Akenuki was also in charge of the land-scaping at the Miho Museum of Art in Shiga (1996).

These Japanese designers create landscapes that are trulymodern in form and content. Yet their creations are based ona deep historical understanding that the art of Japanese gar-dens is first and foremost the art of setting stones. In a broad-er perspective, when Mirei Shigemori talks of his designphilosophy as reconnecting humanity with the primordialforce of nature, and Kengo Kuma of making architecture “aframe of nature” to allow us to experience the environment“more deeply and intimately,” we recognize that these design-ers are striving to recover modern man’s relationship with thenatural world – a vital and profound endeavor in this anxiety-ridden age. – Natsumi Nonaka

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Garden at Tofuku-ji.

Listening to Stones

In the west of Kyoto, off the main streets that run out fromthe city center, are stockyards where gardeners come to buythe stuff of their trade. Some yards deal in plants, others instones; most have a little of both. They are often hard to findat first, lost in the narrow streets, but you’ll know one when

you see it. Not by the sign out front – there rarely is one – butbecause of the cluster of leafy heads that pushes up above thesurrounding houses: tall green islands in a sea of brown. Ifyou are accustomed to stockyards in America, with their neatrows of uniform, well-tagged material lined up by size andvariety, you’ll be in for a surprise: it’s a bit like a bric-a-bracshop. Plants of all sizes and types are mixed together, withstones, lanterns, and water basins tucked beneath them likechicks and hens. There are no botanical names on plants(Japanese gardeners have no use for Latin) – in fact, there areoften no labels at all, not even prices or Japanese names. Thelack of labeling is mostly because these yards deal only withthe trade, and that sort of information is either unneeded (likethe plant names) or varies by customer (like the prices). Thehodgepodge arrangement stems partly from the lack of spacein Japan, partly because some materials come into the yard bit by bit when old gardens are dismantled, and partly as ameans of display. You can hear the owner suggesting, “Doesn’tthis pine look good next to this maple . . . and what about thisstone lantern? Nice match,right?” But what’s reallyinteresting about this seem-ingly haphazard way of lay-ing out the stockyards is notits root cause but what itreveals about the nature ofJapanese garden design.

There is a mode ofdesigning in which thedesigner envisions and plansout every last detail of adesign – a controlling orintentional mode, one mightsay. You can find thisapproach in many culturesaround the world. In Japan,

things designed this way include precisely detailed lacquerboxes, porcelain teacups, and Buddhist temple architecture –not to mention the products of Toyota, Sony, and company.But there is another mode of designing, one that is often asso-ciated with traditional Japanese design, that began in the 1500sin cities like Kyoto within the context of the social gatheringswe now call the tea ceremony. In this mode the designer doesnot try to control every aspect of the design but instead revelsin the unexpected serendipity of the process of creation.Wood-fired pottery is a good example, where the magic of thekiln adds to what the potter has begun; another is highly cur-sive “grass-script” calligraphy, in which the way the brushopens and streaks is never fully planned out. And, of course,there is garden design.

The reason gardening in Japan falls squarely into theserendipitous mode of designing is that the materials used,being natural and therefore unique, disallow the designerfrom stipulating entirely what will happen. The designer doesnot dictate that a stone or tree will be exactly a certain size orshape; instead he only roughsout an idea and then searchesfor materials with which towork. Perhaps he goes to astockyard like the ones in thewest of Kyoto. Some of the

materials he finds are natural – wild, you could say – like boul-ders taken from rivers or mountains. Others are shaped by thehuman hand, like carefully pruned pines and maples. But allof them share one important aspect: they are unique speci-mens, no two the same. As these diverse pieces are found, andthen gathered to the site, the design shifts to accommodatetheir various “capabilities.” The pine, perhaps, is a little largerand more canted than what the designer imagined. Fine.Everything just slides over a bit. The stone chosen for beneaththe pine is weak on one side, but that can be balanced by plac-ing another stone next to it. In this mode of designing, thegarden is not entirely created within the designer’s mind andthen actualized. Rather, to some degree, it is suggested by thematerials themselves.

This concept was described in an eleventh-century garden-ing treatise called the Sakuteiki, which translates literally asRecords on Garden Making. I call it The Art of Setting Stonesbecause the expression used in the treatise to mean “gardenmaking” was “setting stones.” In the Sakuteiki, the reader isadvised that when placing stones, the most important stone ofan arrangement should be set first and all the other stonesthat are to be set afterwards should be set in accordance withthis first stone. The author expressed this as “following therequest of the stone,” suggesting that it was not the aestheticof the designer that was important; rather it was the inherentnature of the material that called for a certain design to flowfrom it. In other words, the act of gardening was not simply anexercise in design. It was in fact a method of nature study, apractice that asked the designer to look carefully at the worldand understand things from the material’s point of view.

Listening to the stones – that is, designing “from the mater-ial’s point of view” – was one of the things I learned by work-ing in Japan for many years. This has become a foundation ofthe way I design. Another was to work with a very limitedpalette. In many parts of the world, the garden is seen as aplace to gather the bounty of the natural world. The beautifularrangement of a wide variety of natural elements, especiallyplants – carefully balancing their forms, textures, and colors –is considered key to a good design. Nowadays, gathering thebounty of nature is increasingly being replaced by gathering

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The empty space of the garden,

referred to as “ma,” is purposefully

carved out by the design of

the moss areas. Spiral Garden,

K-Residence, Kyoto.

the bounty of genetic modifi-cation as people cast about forthe latest horticultural vari-eties, but the design moderemains the same: the displayof bounty. To some degree thiswas also true in Japan – long,long ago, back when theSakuteiki was written. Yet eversince the thirteenth and four-teenth centuries, under theinfluence of the severe ethos of the newly empowered militaryclass, as well as the Zen Buddhist predilection for strippingaway outward appearances to reveal inner truths, gardendesign became increasingly rarefied.

This can be seen in many of the other arts of Japan, too.Haiku poetry, for instance, reduces expression to just seven-teen syllables. Flower arranging, or ikebana, usually involvesonly one stem each of three species, and in some cases only asingle stem with a bud yet to bloom. The utter simplicity ofthe flower arrangement draws the viewer in and encouragesclose examination, the way a person who whispers oftenattracts attention. The stillness created by the act of simplifica-tion allows one to perceive details that would otherwise beoverlooked. This mode of designing is not just an aesthetic; itis a method of heightening awareness, of understanding thenature of Nature.

Garden design works in a similar way. The gardensdesigned as entry spaces for the tea ceremony, for instance,which are called roji, or pathways, contain no flowers becausethey would detract from the experience to come. The six-teenth-century tea treatise, Usoshû, states that in the tea gar-

den, “no grasses or treesare planted, no stones are set, no sand has beenspread, and no smallstones are laid out asgroundcover. In this way,the attention of the guestis not distracted and . . .they put their spirit intothe tea gathering.” Thesimplification of design isnot simply an elegant andreserved sense of taste(although that is one wayto look at it); rather it is away of opening up thesenses of those who passthrough the garden so thatthey will be more highly

aware of the subtleties of the experience that awaits them. Bydesigning with a simplified palette, a quiet space is createdthat lends itself to contemplation so that the garden not onlypleases but also inherently encourages philosophic reflectionand poetic interpretation.

An interesting comparison with Western garden design canbe seen in the way plants are treated – in particular, those that,like the Japanese maple, bear the label “Japanese.” In any greengarden you visit in Japan (for there are some with no green atall), chances are you will find a Japanese maple. If you do, itwill be Acer palmatum: green-leafed, upright, and as close to awild maple as you can get. Red-leafed? Cut-leafed? Variegated?Weeping? Dwarf? These varieties are not used at all. Not inJapan. It is telling that the same plant has been perceived sodifferently. In Japan the maple is appreciated as a poeticalemblem of the changing seasons, especially as an indicator ofautumn. Any wild maple will do fine for that role; in fact, the

wilder the better. In the West the Japanese maple is seen as atrophy plant, an object rather than a symbol, and the wild,green Japanese maple is only used as rootstock.

The previously mentioned haiku poetry touches on a thirdthing that has stuck with me from my time in Japan. As men-tioned, the haiku has only seventeen syllables, broken intothree stanzas. The expression that results is only the sugges-tion of a poetic image, just a hint without any fleshing out ofthe details. By paring things down, the poet leaves ample roomfor the reader (or listener) to fill in what has not been written.A highly abbreviated poetic form like haiku inherently engagesits readers, encouraging them to participate in the poem byfinishing it, or expanding on it, themselves. The simplificationis not just a tricky exercise in seeing how much can beexpressed with how little (although certainly that, too, is partof it); it is a way of drawing the reader into the creativeprocess.

Likewise a garden that is designed in this manner – quiet,simple, unassertive – engages those people who experience the

10

The pattern of the stepping stone

path was not designed in the

studio, but developed after the indi-

vidual pieces were collected and

considered. Tea Garden, Hiden-in

Temple, Kyoto.

The palette of the garden is kept

very simple: green in the moss and

mountain laurel, tan from the

wooden fence, and tones of the

stone lantern, water basin and river

jacks. Water-Stone Garden, B-

Residence, Darien, Connecticut.

garden and encourages them to continue the creative processthemselves. The clearest examples of this way of designing arethe gardens called karesansui, which are made of stones set inraked sand. The word karesansui is written with three charac-ters meaning dry-mountain-water. “Mountain-water” is a wayof saying nature, or landscape; “dry” simply refers to the factthat no actual water was used in building the garden. Thesegardens are images of wild nature, islands in the sea, or moun-tain ranges peeking above a layer of clouds. They are in no waymeant to be literal depictions of a landscape, like scale modelsbuilt to film a movie. Rather they are abstractions in which thevarious parts of the garden symbolically represent wholeswaths of the world. A single stone is a mountain; three stonesmake an archipelago; a few yards of raked sand becomes theocean; a single aged pine is an endless forest.

In between the stones in the garden – or the aged pine, orwhatever other few elements are used to compose the arrange-ment – are large areas that are left seemingly empty. They maybe spread with white sand or covered with moss or some othersimple treatment. In Japan these empty spaces are referred towith the deceptively simple word ma, meaning a pause, a phys-ical or temporal space. The portions left unpainted in an inklandscape painting, a period of quiet time in a musical score,still moments in the movement of a Noh theater actor are allreferred to as ma. This emptiness, however, is not somethingleft out or left over; rather it is specifically created by takingtruly empty space, or time, and punctuating it with certainsparse elements. The spaces framed by those punctuationsconstitute the ma and it is within those spaces that the mindcan wander, filling in the unpainted landscape, the unex-pressed music, or the part of the garden that waits to be com-pleted.

Listening to the materials, using a simple palette, leavingemptiness within a design. Of the many aspects of Japaneseculture that have become part of me and the way I design,these three stand out as the most influential on my work.What is important to me about them is that they are not justways of creating a clean look (although that is part of it – haveI mentioned that before?). They are methods for increasingawareness. Not just ways of designing, but ways of learning tosee. – Marc Peter Keane

Tea and Sympathy: A Zen Approach to Landscape Gardening

On a beautiful day this past spring, I drove to thenorth shore of Long Island to meet with StephenMorrell, director of the John P. Humes JapaneseStroll Garden in Locust Valley. The garden, situat-ed among several old, Gold Coast estates, consists

of four acres of steep, wooded hillside carved out of a cornerof the family property inherited by Humes’s wife, Jean. Its ori-gin was the purchase in 1960 of a shoin-zukuri-style Japaneseteahouse from Gracie Orientalia, a New York firm specializingin Asian décor, following a trip the couple had taken to Kyotowhere they had fallen in love with Japanese gardens. The chal-lenge they now faced was how to create an appropriate settingfor it.

They discovered livingnearby a Japanese couplewho had set up a landscape-gardening practice on LongIsland after being releasedfrom a World War II intern-ment camp. The coupleframed the teahouse withspecimen plantings of ever-greens and bamboos andlaid out white gravel paths.In addition, they created akamejia, a tortoise-shapedcomposition of shrubs androcks symbolizing longevity,a traditional element of Japanese imperial gardens. Theyreshaped the pond, which sits in a hollow below the teahouse,into its present configuration of a gourd, echoing the pondsfound in old, Heian-era gardens. Rocks were grouped intoforms that had symbolical associations. For example, onegroup brings to mind a crane, a bird representing immortality.But the Humeses had no further design and maintenance plan

for the property and because John Humes was an ambassadorliving abroad during the Nixon and Ford administrations, the garden around the teahouse received only routine mainte-nance from his estate gardener.

Upon his return to this country in the late 1970s, Humes,who took primary responsibility for the project, hired a locallandscaping firm in an attempt to reverse a ten-year period ofneglect. The manner in which the horticultural crew vigorous-ly pruned the trees and shrubs near the teahouse and sup-pressed the weedy overgrowth with plastic sheeting was aliento the Japanese aesthetic, to say the least. In fact, Humes hadfar more ambitious plans: he wanted to not only restore andexpand the original garden, but also open it to the public.

Fortunately, in his search to find someonewho could transform the property and realize this ideal, he met Stephen Morrell.

Morrell’s path to the Humes StrollGarden and his own design practice (hisfirm is called Contemplative Landscapes)began in Fall River, Massachusetts, where hespent his childhood next to a forest preservein which he played every day. “The forestgives you sense of place and an aestheticcontext through its tree structure, leaf tex-ture, and characteristics of light,” heexplained when I spoke with him during myvisit to the garden. “I feel at home in theEastern deciduous woodland; I am most atpeace there.” His father, a leader of the

Operating Engineers Union, had pursued a career in his ownfather’s line of work, and he urged his sons to do the same.Two of them complied, but Morrell, remembering the veg-etable garden he had planted and tended as a boy, knew withan unusual degree of certainty for a teenager what he wantedto do instead. To please his father, he worked summers on aconstruction crew and trained for a year after high school inhow to handle heavy construction equipment. “That experi-ence provided an understanding of landscape grading anddrainage,” he told me, “but I knew where my heart was, so I

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Stephen Morrell

naturally gravitated toward being a gardener. My dad couldn’tunderstand why. He told me that gardening was just a hobby.”

In 1978, when he was twenty-two and had begun to train forhis chosen career, Morrell met Ralph Hartman, a landscapearchitect whose designs had a Japanese sensibility. Hartmanencouraged him to enroll in the New York Botanical Garden’sSchool of Professional Horticulture, and there he heard aboutthe job opportunity Humes was offering. At the time Morrellhad his sights set on an internship in Europe after graduation.Nevertheless, because of his interest in the Japanese landscapeaesthetic, he met with Humes, who must have been impressedwith the young man. “He did the most amazing thing,”Morrell recalled. “He trusted me with the garden’s future andsaid he would put things on hold for a year until I got back.”His time abroad began in Belgium, where he trained withJelena de Belder at Arboretum Kalmthout and continued atLes Bois des Moutiers, the extraordinary Olmstedian-cum-Arts-and-Crafts garden in Varengeville-sur-Mer on theNormandy coast.

Upon his return in 1982, Morrell set about developing thegarden according to his own evolving aesthetic. The challengehe faced was learning how to improve on the design of theJapanese gardeners who had formed the pond and landscapesurrounding the teahouse and to wed it with the surroundingwoodland in order to create a seamless whole. To do this suc-cessfully he felt he needed to learn more about Japanese cul-ture. “I came of age in the seventies,” he told me, “so theculture of Eastern philosophy was in the air, but it wasn’t untilI came here that I became a practitioner of Zen and incorpo-rated meditation into my life.” At the Zen Mountain Monastery,located on a 230-acre forest preserve in the Catskills, he founda master with whom he studied zazen, the formal practice ofseated meditation. During this period of self-education he alsostudied the art of tea ceremony at the Urasenke ChanoyuCenter of New York, a branch of the Urasenke Konnichian inKyoto. At the same time that Morrell was beginning hisimmersion in the Zen Buddhist ethos, he was developing hisvision for the garden. Humes approved of his ideas andsought to ensure the garden’s future by redirecting the entireannual income of his family foundation to its support.

Since my visit coincided with one of the frequent grouptours Morrell gives, I was invited to observe the tea ceremonyhe had planned as the culmination of a guided stroll alongwhite gravel paths and moss-encrusted stones leading up anddown the steep hillside on which the teahouse (chashitsu) sitson its platform. Beside the entrance to the defined space thatsets the teahouse apart from the rest of the garden, he directedour attention to the tsukubai, a large standing stone with itstop scooped to form a basin from which he ladled water,explaining how the host and the guests (normally around four)purify their hands upon first entering a tea garden. Now,because of the number of members of the visiting gardenclub, he was serving only the chairman, who knelt in the tea-house with expectant curiosity. The rest of us stood outsidethe walls of shoji screens, which had been slid open so wecould observe the ceremony. “The purpose is to cultivate pres-ence, moments of awareness,” he told us.

It seemed incongruous at first to see a tall, muscular gar-dener dressed in work clothes performing a ritual more fre-quently associated with petite, kimono-clad women. Withprecise and practiced motions he began serving the gardenclub chairman while explaining the significance of each ges-ture and stage of the tea presentation. He stepped onto a tata-mi mat in the serving space with a white linen cloth (chakin)

over one wrist that he would later use to wipe out the beautifulceramic tea bowl (chawan) he held in his hands. A slenderbamboo tea scoop (chashaku) rested across the top of the teabowl. In the bowl was a small whisk (chasen) with which hewould stir the special green powered tea (matcha) used for thetea ceremony. He placed these next to a water container andthen went back to the preparation area at the back of theroom. He returned holding a large stoneware vessel for thewaste water (kensui) , a bamboo water ladle (hishaku), and agreen bamboo rest for the kettle lid (futaoki). He next wipedthe tea container and scoop, afterwards folding a silk cloth(fukusa) used for this purpose with meditative concentration.Then he ladled hot water, which had been boiling over a smallbrazier, into the tea bowl, rinsed the whisk, emptied the bowl,and wiped it clean. Following these preparations, he scoopedtea into the tea bowl, poured in a little water, whisked the mix-ture into a paste, added more water, and continued whiskingto create a thick frothy tea broth. Bowing, he placed the bowlin front of his hesitant guest, who was waiting for cues as towhat she should do next. Morrell instructed her to rotate thebowl in her hands in order to admire its rustic beauty beforeshe drank. Bowing after she had, he rose from his tatami matand disappeared again, returning with a small plate of sweets.At the conclusion of a few sips and nibbles, denoting her par-

ticipation in the meal, heaccepted the tea bowl fromher, rinsed it and the whisk,and cleaned the tea contain-er. All of this was done slow-ly, implicitly encouragingher to quietly admire theobjects that were now beingput away.

After the group left,Morrell and I walkedthrough the garden as heexplained what he and his

12

Japanese teahouse, John P. Humes

Japanese Stroll Garden, Locust

Valley.

crew of two other gardeners do. The bulk of the work consistsof “adjusting and responding to the things nature throws yourway.” Tip-pruning and redistributing gravel are necessary rou-tine tasks, but the most important one by far is groomingmoss, the soft emerald carpet that is the quintessence of aJapanese garden and the glory of a natural woodland as well.“The importance of moss,” Morrell said, “is that it provideshorizontal continuity and depth to the ground plane. Moss isso lush, and when you have something in such mass and arelooking at this expanse of continuous green growth, your con-nection to it feels immediate and direct.”

I noticed that the moss was differently textured in placesand assumed that there must be three or four species. When Iasked if this were true, Morrell replied, “There are more thaneleven in the garden of the four hundred found throughoutNew York State. Moss is a whole plant world unto itself.” Toexplore it in depth he returned to the New York BotanicalGarden, where he learned to identify moss by the cell structureof its leaves in cross-section under a microscope. As I bentdown to stroke a piece of the furry green carpet, he told methat this moss was Plageoniam, the dominant species in thegarden because it will grow anywhere except on rocks. Thenthere is Thuidium, a sodlike mat. Although moss can spreadquickly, it will die if it is covered with leaves or twigs, and goesdormant without consistent moisture, turning an unattractivedull yellowish green.

When the arrival of a tour is imminent, Morrell and hiscrew give the garden’s ground plane a once-over with rakes,but when they have time they brush the moss with dustbrooms. Moss also needs weeding, a task that emphaticallycalls for the Zen virtue of patience. Yet to kneel with one’s faceclose to its surface and pluck the tiny weeds that sproutamidst its conglomeration of inconspicuous leaves, aware ofthe odor of moist earth, can be intensely satisfying. Morrellsaid, “That sensory experience – the smell, the touch, the lushgreen color – is life-affirming. ”

For him, moss weeding offers an opportunity to practicemeditation. “Zen practice,” he said, “is about constantly culti-vating your ability to be fully present, to eliminate the gap thatoccurs when you check out mentally. It requires that youreturn to the task at hand whether it is sitting meditation or

13

Fair Japan: Japanese Gardens at American World’s Fairs,1876–1940

Between the Civil War and World War II, world’s fairswere enormously influential in shaping Americanpopular culture and attitudes. The Ferris wheel, the icecream cone, and the hot dog are all said to havedebuted at fairs, and these international expositions

were no less momentous for developments in gardening andbotany. At the first American fair, held in Philadelphia in 1876,the U.S. Department of Agriculture exhibited lawns and lawn-care “arrangements” to propagate the idea of the grass lawn asa distinctive feature of the American residential yard. For thatsame exposition, the Japanese brought along the kudzu vine.

The 1876 fair also witnessed the construction of the first“Japanese garden” in North America. The success of this gar-den spawned a long series of such gardens at world’s fairs in America, each conceived as a cultural artifact and receivedas an exotic aesthetic import. Yet, for the sponsor of theselandscapes – Japan’s imperial government, formed in 1868 –each garden was also intended to create an image of Japan thatserved a subtle but significant political goal.

The gardens at these grand events constituted the first,largest, most-visited, and best-publicized examples of Japaneselandscape design abroad. Built primarily by workers fromJapan and sponsored by the Japanese government, effectivelythe gardens were authorized; the ostensible authenticity oftheir materials, designs, and meanings was guaranteed by dintof official patronage and genuine craftsmanship. From thestart then, the act of making a “Japanese garden” outside Japanhad immense legitimacy and prestige.

Because many of the structures and even some of the plantswere later incorporated into commercial, civic, or private gar-dens, these exposition gardens had extensive second lives. Forinstance, the Japanese Village at the California Mid-WinterExposition (1894) became San Francisco’s famous Golden GatePark Japanese Tea Garden, and the success of that garden, inturn, led to a string of commercial tea gardens in Californiaoperated by G. T. Marsh. The lavish pond-style stroll gardenssurrounded by pavilions that were built for many of the expositions – derived from Edo period daimyo stroll gardens,as revived in the Meiji era – were also imitated, both in themany Japanese-style gardens built at the estates of America’seconomic elite before World War II and in civic gardens after

weeding. The message is there is no place to get to in your lifeexcept here and now.” He tries to carry this over into the lessserene moments of life: working with clients, being a father,commuting between Connecticut and Long Island. He says itis sometimes difficult but that “you can cultivate a sense ofpresence even in these things if you let go of self-attachment.The important thing is to be attentive, aware, present, and toembrace the moment, whatever it is.”

The garden is for Morrell a means of personal transcen-dence: “Remove the subject-object duality and you becomewhat you are doing,” he remarked. “That’s what the act of gar-dening does for me. It is about finding joy in the simplestthings. The Japanese call it wabi sabi. Wabi has a subjective ori-entation; it fosters spirituality based on meeting basic needswith minimal means and savoring the economy and purity ofa bare-bones existence. Sabi is more objective and refers to anappreciation of the humblest articles of everyday life, seeingbeauty in imperfection, understatement, the unexpected,asymmetry, and the effects of aging and weathering.”

I asked him how one can retain this admirable perspectivein such an environmentally troubled age as the one we live in.Morrell agreed that contemporary humanity is devaluingnature as a source of spiritual nourishment by making itsomething apart, rather than a part of us. But he remains opti-mistic, believing that change will occur if enough people bearwitness to the possibility of a cultural shift by caring intimate-ly for a plot of land. “The Zen way is not the only way. A veg-etable patch will do. The garden is a metaphor,” he concluded.“If you are a gardener, you are a witness to the necessity forstewardship, caring for the earth.” – Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

The John P. Humes Japanese Stroll Garden, a preservation project of The Garden Conservancy, is open to the public on weekends fromlate April through October. For more information visit:www.gardenconservancy.org/newpages/features.php

it. Finally, many of the carpenters and garden builders whocame to America to work on fair gardens also remained in thecountry and contributed to other garden projects.

International expositions served as an opportunity forJapan to export desired aesthetic and cultural values. What hasbeen less recognized is that fair gardens were also importantideological tools. The fairs themselves were microcosms ofinternational relations in the competitive age when matureindustrialization met late colonialism. In this highly chargedatmosphere, the meanings formed through Japanese gardensand the rhetoric associated with them were inherently politi-cal. As idealized representations of a pre-modern Japan in themodern West, the gardens were intended to portray the coun-try as a tranquil, artistic, and beautiful land – a nation that,despite its contemporary outward show of modernity, mecha-nization, and militarization, was at heart a kind of pre-modernutopia where old values still held sway, where craftsmanshipwas the rule, and where beauty seemed to spring from boththe land itself and the fingers of its people. At the fairs,Japanese gardens featured architecture in styles redolent ofthe past as well as actual objects that were legitimately old –usually stone lanterns and bonsai. Oases of greenery inset withponds and streams, the gardens provided an undeniable visualand mental respite that was often linked more broadly withJapanese culture in official descriptions of the gardens.

Set against the hard-edged physical and ideological envi-ronments of the fairs, the Japanese gardens seemed soft andcool, sanctuaries for body and mind. And in contrast to theaggressive modernity that was the hallmark of many countries’exhibits, Japan created a self-image linked to the past. The official Japanese poster at the 1939 New York World’s Fairbegins, “Changeless, timeless Japan . . . Its enduring charmtakes place naturally in ‘The World of Tomorrow.’” It con-cludes, “When the Fair’s modern world bewilders you, remem-ber – and enjoy – the Japanese Pavilion.”

If the concept of the Japanese garden was created in theofficial discourse (that of both the exposition organizers andthe Japanese government), it was disseminated by the popularpress, which brought visual and verbal descriptions of thesegardens to the entire nation. The gardens were subsequentlyanalyzed in books and articles. Typically the Japanese-style gar-den built at each fair was simply called The Japanese Garden,or other non-historically specific variants such as The ImperialJapanese Garden. And just as most non-Japanese still lumptogether the diverse history of Japanese gardens into the total-

izing term “the Japanese gar-den,” so too do the placardsand pamphlets at modernJapanese-style gardens stilltend to favor grandiose, ahis-torical statements linkingaspects of Japanese gardendesign to eternal verities ofJapanese culture. The cultur-al assumptions embedded inthe Japanese gardens at thefairs are still very much alive.

Performing on the World StageFor most viewers, world’sfairs were entertainment.But for the governmentsinvesting their resources andprestige, fairs functioned as a kind of theater in whicheach nation played a differ-ent role, like an actor upon a stage. Often national participa-tion at fairs assumed an hourglass-like configuration: powerfulnations were abundant, weaker Western countries rarely par-ticipated, and what is now called the “third world” was wellrepresented. The presence of dominant nations was intendedto signal progress, power, and pride. If second-tier nationswere represented at all, they usually made token appearances.Occupying the lowest rung on the ladder of international sta-tus were the territorial colonies of Africa, the Middle East, andAsia. They did not control their own presentation at the fairsbut were represented by their conquerors as trophies of con-quest and evidence of empire. Perhaps the most strikingexample of this practice was at the 1900 Exposition Universellein Paris, where the French displayed their imperial posses-sions and ambitions through replicas of monuments fromtheir colonial holdings, including Angkor Wat and a Siamesepavilion.

Within this brutal power dynamic, Japan occupied a singu-lar position, and its rulers consciously exploited its unique-ness to craft a complex message in which gardens played a keyrole. Because of its status as an Asian country, Japan was con-sidered one of the backward nations of the world, part of thestatic, passive, and mute Orient against which the dynamicnations of the Occident measured their power and progress.Certainly at the first fairs where Japan participated – Paris(1867), Vienna (1873), and Philadelphia (1876) – it was perceivedas a quaint and exotic land just emerging from centuries ofsleep. Yet by the middle of the 1890s, the era when America’sgreat fairs began in earnest, Japan was fast becoming aWestern-style colonial power. As the Great Empire of Japan,the small island nation was rapidly industrializing at homeand creating its own dominion in Asia.

In a series of striking coincidences, the largest Americanfairs occurred during Japan’s wars or other critical momentsin foreign policy. The Chicago Columbian Fair of 1893 took place on the cusp of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. San Francisco’s Mid-Winter Exposition occurred during theconflict itself, and the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition

14

Japanese Pavilion, Chicago World’s

Fair, 1893.

marked the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05.The four fairs on the Pacific Coast between 1907 and 1915 coincided with anti-Japanese immigration sentiment in theUnited States and agitation for legislation to limit the rights of Japanese immigrants and eventually bar them altogether.Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition in 1933 followedJapan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and coastal China in1932. And to cap this remarkable chronological convergence ofJapanese imperial expansion and the nation’s presentation of itself in America, the fairs in San Francisco and New York(both 1939–40) took place during Japan’s “Sacred War” in China – a prelude to the eventual “Greater East Asia War” withthe United States and Britain. To read newspapers that werepublished during the run of these fairs is to experience two different views of the world. Whereas the front-page headlinesdevoted to military and political battles suggest a Japanmarked by turmoil, the pictures and descriptions of the Japan-ese pavilions and gardens at the expositions evoke a land oftimeless tranquility.

Several theorists have examined the ways in which world’sfair expositions were a part of the “apparatus of representa-tion” in the creation of modern consumerism, nationalism,and imperialism, and noted their role within the discourse ofOrientalism. But these critiques apply differently to Japan,because – although the country was “opened” by western mili-tary force – the Japanese were never colonial subjects. On thecontrary, they were successful colonizers. As such, the nationalidentity “performed” by Japan was a complex synthesis ofopposing roles.

This hybrid presentation was facilitated by the heteroge-neous space of the fairs, where nations were offered severalstages on which to display their national narratives. A foreigncountry could acquire space within multiple exhibition hallsand also lease a parcel of landon which to build its nationalpavilion. Japan used bothvenues to the fullest advantage:at the major American fairs, itwas either the largest or sec-ond-largest renter of space inthe halls dedicated to industry,agriculture, education, and so

on, presenting its latest achievements in art and technology. Inthese crowded, competitive arenas, Japan demonstrated that itwas no backward nation but instead would soon rival thenations of North America and Europe in social progress, eco-nomic might, and military influence.

When it came to building a national pavilion, however,Japan presented itself in very different terms. Whereas manyother nations linked themselves wholly with progress by con-structing national pavilions in contemporary styles, Japansteadfastly embodied itself in historicizing structures set inlavish gardens. In contrast to the material and social progressindicated by the displays in the exhibition halls, here the mes-sage was of ostensible oriental stasis, where Japan epitomizedAsian tranquility, tradition, and beauty. If the Japan displayedin the exhibition halls was masculine and westernizing, theJapan glimpsed at the national pavilions was feminine and ori-entalizing. Although the two images acted in concert through-out the fair as a whole, when Japan had to be reduced to asingle image it was the feminine land of tradition that pre-vailed.

This image constituted Japan’s dominant or core identity atthe fairs for at least two reasons. First and most obviously, thepicture of Japan as traditional was associated with the nationalpavilion, the essential representation for each country. Second,while displays of Japan’s modernity were dispersed to variousexhibition halls and might easily be confused with similarproducts or systems from other nations, the display of endur-ing tradition was concentrated in the self-contained space thatwas distinctly Japanese. Thus Japan seemed western and com-petitive in connection with other nations, but at home and onher own terms in her national space, she conveyed a muchmore congenial and distinctly nonthreatening visage. Whilethe Japanese presence at the fairs was both masculine and

feminine, the feminine iden-tity was implied to be thetruer one. In addition to, orperhaps in spite of, theproud evidence of Japanesemechanical, mercantile, andmilitary might, the messageintentionally promoted bythe Japanese pavilion andattached garden was thatJapan remained artistic,

agrarian, and feminine – in essence, peaceful. By positioning Japanese identity in a garden, and by posit-

ing the garden as a quintessential expression of Japanese cul-ture, the Japanese government skillfully linked Japanesenessand gardens – at once demonstrating a living cultural traditionand “naturalizing” the highly political message being propa-gated. This was not a simple device born of the positiveresponse of Westerners to Japanese gardens, although thatquickly became part of the equation; it was an attempt to sug-gest the inherent character or “nature” of the Japanese as apeople and Japan as a nation. In essence, if through gardens(and the explanatory texts surrounding them) we could witnessthe love of nature in Japanese culture, then it was a short jumpto the idea that present–day Japan and its political system werethemselves natural and proper. In the neat tautology of oneexposition pamphlet from 1940, “Japan is ever true to its eter-nal nature.” This insistent message indicates the insecurity onboth domestic and international fronts of the new imperialregime, itself created only at the time of the first nineteenth-century fairs and reaching its zenith contemporaneously withthe last great fairs in 1940. Anxious about its past and for itsfuture, the Japanese government felt compelled to presentitself as inevitable and enduring, a refined force of nature thatfound easy expression in lavish gardens.

Fair JapanThe official Japanese garden at each fair was usually not theonly Japanese garden there. In the commercial entertainmentzones located just outside the exposition gates, Japanese entre-preneurs invariably constructed a Japanese enclave to competewith such attractions as the Bavarian Beer Garden or Streets of Cairo. Run by businessmen like the ubiquitous YumindoKushibiki (1859–1924), who constructed a commercial Japanesegarden near the Boardwalk at Atlantic City and even a Japanesetea garden on the rooftop of the original Madison SquareGarden, they were small and undeniably commercial, oftensqueezed between a restaurant and theater or bazaar.

It is tempting to divide and oppose these two types ofJapanese fair gardens as official and unofficial representations,and see the small sideshow gardens as an expression of thesubversive heterogeneity of fairs. Yet the commercial gardens

15

The Japanese Garden, Japanese

Pavilion, Golden Gate Exposition,

San Francisco, 1939.

helped to underscore the dominant rhetoric of the Japanesenational pavilion. For instance, photos and postcards of thesegardens usually feature women – geisha in the terminology ofthe time – posing in front of an arched bridge or miniaturestream. This feminization of gardens, and by extension theprojection of a nonthreatening message for the entire country,reinforced the underlying theme conveyed at the officialJapanese pavilions.

One could even argue that these commercial spaces weremore effective agents for Japan’s national interests preciselybecause they were not associated with the Japanese govern-ment. The complex political expedience of their existence isindicated by the name that was used for most of them: FairJapan. At a minimum, Fair Japan was a clever play on words,suggesting swiftness of mind and familiarity with the Englishlanguage. Most obviously, it asserted that Japan was both abeautiful country and a virtuous one. The verbal conflation ofaesthetics and ethics in the pun on “fair” strengthened theoften stated link between Japan’s physical attractiveness andthe equally appealing content of its society and culture. If gar-dens at international expositions were intended to displayJapan’s national identity, then the fundamental nature of thatidentity was manifest in the physical forms of the gardens, inthe propagandizing name Fair Japan, and in the way that mostexposition gardens were used.

Gardens as Performance Art If, among such familiar aesthetic constructions as paintingand architecture, gardens are particularly performative becausethey call for bodily engagement within a dynamic environ-ment, then the Japanese gardens at world’s fairs are masterlyexamples of landscape as performance art. They were createdfor a public audience, meant to entertain and, in so doing, topersuade. In keeping with these goals, they were often overtlytheatrical in style and function. And, if we believe contempo-rary descriptions, they were carried out with a surpassing tech-nical and artistic skill that became part of the message ofJapanese ingenuity put to essentially peaceable ends.

Like most performances, the gardens were temporary, yettheir goal was to establish a lasting impression of Japan in theminds of those who visited. They were meant both to com-memorate a specific event – Japan’s participation at a particu-lar exposition – and more importantly to instill a perduringimage of the modern Japanese nation and its unchanging cul-ture. In essence, their function was to construct and simulta-

neously commemorate the very idea of Japaneseness. In manyways, the gardens and their architecture were intended to portray Japan’s history as a smooth, homogenous prologue tothe modern moment. In these prismatic spaces, the country’sdark and confused condition, in which the tribulations of war, political and social upheaval, and the feelings of nationalinferiority weighed heavily on politicians and business leaders,was clarified and projected. By distilling an equally murkynational history through the filter of a living landscape archi-tectural tradition and laudatory texts, Japan could lay claim toa glorious past that informed the present and suggested aradiant future under imperial rule.

Meaning was created through and between the formal fea-tures of the gardens and the writings for and about them. Itwas also performed literally, in that most gardens were used tohost a variety of spectacles. These events could include speech-es by dignitaries, fashion shows, Japan Day parades and festi-vals, exhibitions of Japanese dance and drama, and even thescreening of films. More subtly but no less importantly, pub-licity photos meant to emphasize the gardens’ beauty andserenity were often animated by the inclusion of Japanesewomen clad in kimonos. This presence of figures costumed inhistorical dress was key, for it indicates that the gardens werenot passive or neutral spaces; rather they were stages for activi-ties which underscored the associations intended by thedesign and articulated through various scripts.

The garden at the main Japanese exhibition site also servedas a transitional space that visitors were made to experiencebefore reaching the national pavilion where the governmentformally presented a contemporary image of the country in photos, dioramas, and other displays. As with the roji or teagarden, through which guests pass before entering the tea-house, the Japanese world’s fair gardens first sought to divestthe visitor of his prior conceptions by presenting an environ-ment that was so idiosyncratic, so self contained, and so per-fect in its execution as to suspend disbelief. In this way, theysoftened up the visitor for the hard sell to follow. These suggestions – that a garden distilled the fundamental charac-teristics of Japan and that Japan itself was a garden – werecleverly integrated into the pavilions, especially those con-structed in the late 1930s whose dominant interior imageswere of Japanese landscapes and women.

In The Wake of Exposition Gardens Given the concurrent histories of Japan’s popular success atAmerican world’s fairs and, from around 1913 at least, the dete-riorating relations between Japan and the United States thatculminated in the ferocious Pacific War and atomic bomb, wemight conclude that the propagandistic use of fair gardenshad no positive political effects in the long term. AlthoughAmericans were charmed by Japanese culture and gardens, thisfascination was quickly separated from admiration for Japanonce it became a serious economic and military threat. TheAmerican acceptance of the fantasy of a feminine-pastoral-his-toric Japan was easily detached from political views of thenation precisely because the fantasy was so manifestly a day-dream. Moreover, when political push came to military shove,Japan was discredited further for having duped the Americanpeople with a false image.

Yet the real question is whether such propagandistic effortsaltered history in less obvious ways by delaying actions tocounter Japanese aggression. It is not far-fetched to imaginethat the degree to which Theodore Roosevelt supported Japanin the Russo-Japanese War was influenced by the Japanese dis-plays at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904, and thatFranklin Roosevelt’s reluctance to embargo Japan until thesummer of 1941 was affected by Japan’s large-scale involvementin the fairs in New York and San Francisco in 1939 and 1940.Because Japan participated on a massive scale and presented acompelling image at America’s fairs, she created an aura ofgoodwill that was eroded more slowly than otherwise mighthave been the case.

One indication of the effects of this sustained campaignis the relatively rapid reappearance of Japanese-style gardens in America after the war. The speedy revival of political andcultural relations with a former enemy was built on a founda-tion laid before the war via such things as Japan’s exposition gardens. In a new age of “Cold War Orientalism,” Japanese gar-dens were soon built in American residential and business set-tings. Moreover, direct echoes of fair gardens are to be foundin sister-city displays and theme parks like Disney World andSea World.

The fact that we again think of the Japanese garden as anaesthetic import devoid of political implications is, paradoxi-cally, a measure of its continuing success as a form of propa-ganda. Yet perhaps the deepest legacy of prewar fair gardens in their demonstration that American public space could be culturally diverse. Unlike the chinoiserie of earlier periods,this manifestation of Asian culture had a certain weight anddimension, and it had to be taken on at least an approxima-tion of its own terms. Asia had become a part of the Americanurban landscape. – Kendall H. Brown

16

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Aesthetics of Japan

Japanese aesthetics have long held an attraction for theWest. The consequences of Commodore Perry’s opening ofJapan in 1854 soon were felt not only in global commerce,but also in the dissemination of Japanese culture throughworld’s fairs, the sale of woodblock prints, and other

means. Josiah Conder, a young British architect who moved toJapan in 1877, both brought western skills to his own architec-tural practice in his new country of residence and spreadJapanese aesthetics abroad. In the twentieth century, despiteWorld War II, Western appreciation for theseaesthetics increased, and they becameincreasingly influential and widespread.

Although the Japanese garden was firstappreciated by Westerners merely for itsexoticism, its more profound and enduringappeal lies in its quality of abstraction – anabstraction that has resonated strongly withthe West’s modern sensibility from the mid-nineteenth century through the present.Japanese treatments of form and color andpattern provide the bold, flat surfaces anddynamic, asymmetrical compositions that weassociate with modernist visual culture.Japanese art, with its root in spiritual prac-tices, is the perfect Eastern correlative to theWest’s desire for pure imagery, providing awelcome counterweight to its innate materi-alism.

And yet charting the influence ofJapanese aesthetics on Western design isneither simple nor obvious. Historians and critics have tendedto set up a simplistic model based on visual analogy – if Alooks like B, then B has influenced A – and such practices leadto reductive explanations of complex phenomena. The mean-dering nature of influence, like a slow stream accumulatingthe flotsam of image and word, is ignored, and the phenome-non of parallel development, whereby sources that have no

contact with each other produce nearly identical forms, isneglected. The challenging issues of the artistic transforma-tion of old ideas into new ones are similarly dismissed. Fromthis perspective, the influence of Japanese art and architecture,more particularly its gardens, is not so simple as is claimed by a conventional model of linear influence.

For instance, the architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969), apromoter of functionalist modernism, much esteemedJapanese architecture and its gardens, but it is unclear howtheir influence manifested itself in his architecture or his

numerous ideological writings. On the otherhand, although Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), America’s most famous twentieth-cen-tury architect, denied its direct influence, henonetheless claimed to have absorbed andtransformed Japanese influence in hisdesigns. In 1893 Wright visited the World’sColumbian Exposition in Chicago; seeingreplicas of Japanese temples there openedhis eyes to the powers of the Japonisme thathad blossomed on the Continent and begunto make inroads in the United States. Whileother young architects dreamed of going tothe École des Beaux-Arts or spending timeon the Grand Tour, Wright yearned forJapan.

Wright first visited Japan in 1905 in thecompany of his wife, Kathryn, and a couplewho were friends and clients. Among thesites Wright visited were gardens, waterfalls,shrines, and temples, and he documented

many of these places with his own photographs. Remarkablyhe took far more photographs of landscapes and gardens thanbuildings. Many of these carefully selected views were unusualin terms of subject and composition. Apparently feeling heunderstood the buildings, he focused on the landscape, tryingto capture its ageless magic.

Wright also became an avid collector of Japanese artifacts,particularly ukiyo-e woodblock prints. He would study their use of perspective by attaching pins to key points in theimages. While like many Western artists he was primarilyinterested in their flat asymmetrical compositions, an aesthet-ic that found expression in his own architectural renderings,they were for him a commodity as well, and he sold them to

clients or used them as collateral for loans. He elaborated theirappeal in a short pamphlet, The Japanese Print, that is centralto understanding a new primitivist phase of his work. Accord-ing to Wright, Japan, like the cultures of Mesoamerica, China,and southeast Asia, contained the pure sources of form thatcould inspire a new modern architecture.

For Wright, the archetypal geometries of the circle, square,and triangle that he found in Japanese art corresponded withthe spiritual qualities of infinity, integrity, and structuralunity, respectively. In their use he sought to provide a meansof moving beyond historicist models toward a discovery of the pure origins of creativity itself. Paralleling contemporaryEuropean interest in non-Western, primitivist sources,Wright’s appropriation and integration of Japanese aestheticsinto his own work laid the foundations of a unique branch of modernism.

At the same time, however, Wright was extremely sensitiveto any implication that his work was derivative. In 1910, whenCharles Robert Ashbee, Wright’s friend and an importantBritish Arts and Crafts architect, was asked to write an intro-duction to a small book of photographs of Wright’s buildings,Ausgeführte Bauten, he claimed in his essay that Japan had“influenced” Wright. The American was furious and censoredAshbee’s remarks when he published the picture book.

Wright had the opportunity of a lifetime when he receivedthe commission in 1913 to design a new Imperial Hotel inTokyo. Rather than abandoning all ornament as did manyEuropean modern architects, here Wright revolutionized itsuse, making the Imperial Hotel a culmination and testamentto his organic philosophy as it had evolved in the previousdecade.

Wright made numerous trips to Japan during this period,the last one in 1922. Never again would he visit the countrythat had so touched his artistic sensibility, but it had a permanent impact on him. His work continued to reverberatewith the Japanese aesthetic until the very end of his career. – Anthony Alofsin

17

Books

The Sun King’s Garden:Louis XIV, André Le Nôtreand the Creation of theGarden of Versailles By Ian Thompson New York: Bloomsbury, 2006

“Warmonger, womanizer,and autocrat,Louis XIVmay also havebeen history’smost fanaticalgardener.”Thus beginsIan Thomp-son’s The SunKing’s Garden,setting thetone for thishandsome, ambitious, andwell-intended book on thecreation of the château andgardens of Versailles. Thebook is indeed ambitious:Thompson set himself thechallenge of synthesizingand condensing the long,complex, and often tedioushistory of the château into amanageable size and palat-able form for the nonspecial-ist reader.

Certainly the author hasdone his homework, provid-ing information, anecdotes,and quotable quotes culledfrom a long list of authorita-tive works, which he lists inhis copious notes and bibli-

ography; perhaps the book’sgreatest benefit is his synthe-sis of recent scholarship onVersailles. Informed,detailed, and animated, hisaccount adds the necessaryhistorical context to bringthe story to life, much in thetradition of serious workslike Nancy Mitford’s The SunKing (1966), Erik Orsenna’s

Le Nôtre:Jardinier duRoi Soleil(2001), and(with a sub-ject closer tohome) WitoldRybczynski’sA Clearing ina Distance:Frederick LawOlmsted andAmerica inNineteenth

Century (1999). At its best, Thompson’s

book is an atmosphericaccount of the colossalenterprise that was thebuilding of Versailles. As themonarch’s principal resi-dence and the eventual seatof government, Versailles isnot to be confused with ahome. It’s not just the sizethat sets it apart, it is its sin-gular purpose: to glorify theabsolute power and personof the Roi Soleil. To theextent the Sun King was syn-onymous with France, the

creation of Versaillesbecomes as much a chroni-cle of seventeenth-centuryFrench history as it is thestory of one man’s lifelongobsession.

As Thompson notes,Versailles “was not made eas-ily.” Thompson vivifies theexhausting history ofVersailles’ creation, demon-strating that even though itwas a place for pomp anddisplay, it was a perpetualchantier, the French word fora construction site. For half a century, from the early1660s until his death in 1715,Louis transformed hisfather’s modest residence atVersailles from a swampylowland into the largest gar-den the world had ever seen– and by some accounts, hedid so not just once butrepeatedly. Louis’s sister-in-law, the Princess Palatine, isquoted as saying “there wasnot a single spot in Versailleswhich was not modified tentimes.”

In size, opulence, andgrandeur, Versailles was andremains without equal.There is only one size atVersailles – huge – and onepurpose – to awe andimpress. On these criteria,Versailles scored perfectly,but at a cost: the bankruptcyof France. As Thompsondemonstrates, the king –much to the chagrin of hissupremely able finance min-ister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert –was never daunted byexpense or, for that matter,

by the seemingly impossible.For example, Louis was afanatical fountain fancierand squandered vast sumsfilling Versailles with theseworks of art and hydraulics.Yet, as good as Louis’shydraulic engineers were,they were incapable of pro-viding a water supply equalto requirements. Not eventhe “Machine de Marly,”which pumped water fromthe Seine to Versailles, couldsatisfy the demand. To reme-dy the shortfall, a plan wasdevised to divert waters toVersailles from the EureRiver, some 60 miles distant.But even with the supervi-sion of France’s best militaryengineer, Sébastien Vauban,and the army’s manpower(22,000 in 1686 alone), not adrop of Eure water everreached Versailles. The priceof this enormous failureamounted to about ten per-cent of the total buildingcost for Versailles.

This fascinating exampleof obsession is only the mostexpensive of Louis’s excessesat Versailles, as every aspectof its building went toextremes. Yet in his drive forglory, Louis forced France torise to the occasion. As iswell known, Versailles, as theseat of the court, madeFrance the cultural capital ofEurope. What Versailles didfor French arts and culture,

it also did for French indus-try, engineering, and horti-culture. Despite the Eurefiasco, French hydraulicengineering became the stateof the art. The demand forthousands of flowers spurredthe growth of a larger andmore efficient French horti-culture industry, whose representatives perfectedprocedures such as treetransplantation and intro-duced innovations in horti-cultural technology andbotanical research. Underthe inspired direction ofJean-Baptiste de La Quin-tinie, Louis’s potager includ-ed over three hundredvarieties of pears alone,including the Bon Chrétien, arare species ripe when othersare out of season.

As the infrastructure ofthe château was emerging, sowas a national system toensure the timely delivery ofmen and materiel. To keepthe enterprise going, all thewhile allowing the monarchand court to inhabit a palace in a constant state ofconstruction, an efficientbureaucratic machine wasfine-tuned by Colbert.Whatever glory Versaillespresented, it was mirroredby the glory of an efficientstate apparatus.

Yet, for all its merits,Thompson’s book is a frus-trating read. The book isbeautifully illustrated, butmost images are not men-tioned in the body of the

work, and the few that are donot appear near the pagethat refers to them. To com-pound the frustration, thereis no cumulative list of illus-trations, forcing the readerto thumb through the bookto find an image under dis-cussion. More unfortunate isthe text. It is disjointed,repetitive, at times logicallyinconsistent, and containsfar too many errors in conti-nuity, dates, and spelling.

Within the space of threeparagraphs, Thompsonwrites, “By the time Le Nôtrehad been summoned toVersailles, things had got outof hand amongst the garden-ers…” and “By the time thatLe Nôtre and his colleaguesarrived in 1662, order waswell on the way to beingrestored.” He writes that theGrotto de Thétis was begunin “1665 [and] was years inthe making,” but then says itwas completed in 1666. (Itwas, in fact, begun around1664/65 and completed circa1674.) He notes the extensive“plant list at Trianon,” butelsewhere writes that the“plant palette of seven-teenth-century France . . .was relatively limited.” Hehas Henriette d’Angleterre,first wife of Louis’s brotherPhilippe, duc d’Orléans, as the daughter of Charles I

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of England on one page, andthe daughter of Charles II ofEngland on another. (CharlesI was her father.) The datefor the Bosquet de l’Étoile is “1668” in the text and “c. 1685–1686” in the illustra-tion.

Equally troubling aresome of Thompson’s inter-pretations. As his openingline implies, Thompsonfocuses on certain aspects ofLouis’s character and relatesthem to the building historyof the gardens and château.Here he has digested a vastamount of old and newmaterial for which the readercan be thankful. Unfortu-nately he is prone to drawingconclusions and makingassumptions that are bothmisleading and ill-conceived,and sometimes at odds withthe information he himselfhas provided.

Thompson is keen onstriking parallels betweenVersailles and its creator.“The King’s passion for hisgardens can be linked intoboth the patterns of hiscomplicated love life and hismilitary adventures, for itseems that he celebratedevery conquest, whether of anew territory or a new cour-tesan, with an extension ofhis garden.” ConverselyThompson tells us that whena mistress fell from favor, anelement of Versailles associ-ated with her would beremoved or destroyed. Forexample, after Louis tired ofhis first official mistress,

Louise de la Vallière, he“needed a secluded retreatwhere he could make love to [Françoise] Athénaïs de Montespan,” his secondofficial mistress, and thuscommanded the Trianon de Porcelaine to be built.Thompson then suggeststhat when Mme de Montes-pan lost Louis’s affection, theking ordered the Trianon’sdestruction at the behest ofhis new official mistress,Françoise d’Aubigné, Mmede Maintenon. Strikingly,Thompson imputes so muchimportance to Louis’s rapa-cious carnality that he sug-gests that the initial impetusfor building Versailles wasthe monarch’s need for asecluded spot to engage inhis amorous adventures.

The facts don’t necessarilyrefute this scenario, but theycannot be used to support it.The Trianon de Porcelainewas begun in 1669, two yearsafter Louis and Mme deMontespan had establishedtheir liaison. The questionbegs: What were they doingduring the intervening twoyears? Likewise, the Trianonde Porcelaine was destroyedin 1687 (a date Thompsondoes not provide), almost adecade after Mme deMontespan had fallen fromfavor. Indeed, Mme deMaintenon was on the ascen-dancy from the early 1680s

and married Louis in asecret morganatic unionshortly after the death of hiswife, Marie-Thérèse, in 1683. Thompson’s provoca-tive thesis oversimplifies theraison d’être for Versaillesand fails to take into accountthe complex relationshipLouis had with his mistress-es. Few were ever droppedcold; most lingered on atVersailles or were well pro-vided for by Louis. Moreover,simultaneous lovers and the queen lived in respect-able, if tense, proximity. BothLouis’s love life and thebuilding of Versailles are toocomplicated to be neatly correlated.

Thompson’s attempts torelate the building ofVersailles with Louis’s con-quests on the battlefield aresimilarly ill-considered. Tobe sure, it is a tried and truefunction of art to commem-orate war victories in monu-ments and the like, andbuilding palaces and wagingwars often have a commonobjective: to glorify andsolidify a ruler’s power.Thompson quotes Colbert:“Your majesty knows that,apart from the gloriousactions of war, nothing cele-brates so advantageously thegreatness and genius ofprinces than building, andall posterity measures themby the yardstick of thosesuperb edifices which theyhave erected during theirlife.” But Louis didn’t need

Colbert’s flattery to under-stand the importance ofbuilding, and – as Thompsonhimself makes abundantlyclear – France was almostalways at war during theconstruction of Versailles.The relationship betweenthese “campaigns” was morecomplex than the author’saccount.

Thompson extrapolateshis discussion of the con-struction–war relationship togarden making and warmaking. Both gardens andwars needed huge amountsof human resources, andboth resulted in great losses.Thompson gives ample sta-tistics and a good summarydiscussion of the casualtiesincurred during the con-struction of Versailles (most-ly due to disease), but heagain overstates the parallels(“lives were lost on thebuilding site almost as easilyas they were at war”) andspeculates beyond the sup-porting evidence (“presum-ably [Louis] regardedgarden-making casualties inthe same way as he thoughtof casualties at war”).

In an overextension of theargument, Thompson ven-tures into even more hypo-thetical territory. He makesthe interesting observationthat André Le Nôtre, Louis’sremarkable garden designer,

often visited the monarch onthe field of battle. “What wasLe Nôtre doing at the siegeof Valenciennes?” Thompsonasks. The honest answer iswe don’t know. Yes, asThompson notes, it was thecommon practice forcourtiers to show interest inwarfare, and yes, the engi-neering techniques of war-fare found their way intogarden construction, espe-cially on the scale ofVersailles. Yet one cannotsuggest, as Thompson does,that Le Nôtre attended thesieges of Valenciennes (1677)and Cambrai (1687) to fur-ther his understanding ofmartial engineering tech-niques for application in cre-ating gardens. AgainThompson undercuts hisassertion with the very factshe provides: Vaux-le-Vicomtewas completed in the early1660s and Versailles was wellunderway by the mid-1670s.

Easily the most engagingaspect of the book isThompson’s discussion ofthe warm, long, and by allcontemporary accounts, sin-cere relationship betweenLouis and Le Nôtre. Despitethe poisonous atmosphere ofthe Old Regime, where suffo-cating etiquette, witheringgossip, and jealous resent-ments were the norm, LeNôtre enjoyed an unsulliedreputation. It seems that hewas “loved by everyone,”especially by the king, theonly person who reallycounted.

Though born of modestmeans into a family of royalgardeners, Le Nôtre rose to heights well beyond hisstation, being ennobled by Louis in 1675. He retired arich man, with an estate that included several proper-ties and an art collection ofover 250 works, some ofwhich eventually landed inthe Louvre. Le Nôtre was not only a supreme gardendesigner – genius, really(though Thompson avoidsthis superlative) – he wasequally adept at workingwith and satisfying hispatron’s wishes. And clearlyLouis was an exacting client.As told by Thompson,Louis’s manic engagement –even from the battlefield – inthe creation of Versailles wasnot just micro-managementof the enterprise: it borderedon collaboration with histeam of designers.

While Thompson gives an adequate discussion of Le Nôtre’s designs (andredesigns) for Versailles, heis on shakier ground whenhe posits the French master’sminor moments as foreshad-owing a picturesque sensi-bility: “But though England’sWilliam Kent would one daybe described as the firstEuropean to have ‘leaped thefence and saw that all Naturewas a garden,’ there is a possibility that Le Nôtre got

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there first.” To support thisclaim, Thompson repeats thewell-known stories of theBosquet des Sources in thePetit Parc (1679–82), and thelater Jardin des Sources atthe Trianon (1687–88). Bothwere wooded areas in whichLe Nôtre departed from hisusual regularized geometriesby designing a rivulet in asomewhat naturalistic mean-der. Notwithstanding theadventurous nature of thebosquets, these two smallpatches of ground withsquiggly streams, entirelyencased in the overall struc-ture of Versailles, cannot beinterpreted as an incipientor tacit gesture toward a newgardening tradition. Thebosquets in question – nei-ther survived long – werebagatelles with no spatialcomponent or structure, thetwo design elements thatconstitute the sine qua nonof Le Nôtre’s style.

Then when Thompsoncontinues the train ofthought (“had [Le Nôtre]lived in a slightly differentperiod, the style madefamous by ‘Capability’ Brown . . . might have beenwithin reach”), he goes off ona tangent that is simply irrel-evant. Accepting that LeNôtre and Brown had vastlydifferent design palettes, heasserts that the differencebetween their methods “has

been overstated,” and thatthey were both adept at read-ing the “capabilities” of thelandscapes they werereworking. For example, LeNôtre put the Pièce d’Eaudes Suisses on the site of aformer duck pond; Browndamned declivities in land-scapes to create lakes. Bothkept to standard designmotifs: Brown’s clumps, LeNôtre’s axis and cross-axes.And both employed thou-sands of men and movedmassive volumes of earth.None of what Thompsonsays is wrong, but what hediscusses is common to alllandscape design at the scalethese men worked. Le Nôtreand Brown were simply par-ticipating in the historicalcontinuum of designing andworking land.

No matter, Thompsonrightfully keeps credit wherecredit is due. Versailles is awork of André Le Nôtre,despite the supporting castof thousands and a long his-tory of garden precedents: “Asteady tide of recent scholar-ship has tended to show howmuch Le Nôtre was a man ofhis times, and how great hisdebt was to earlier Frenchgardeners such as the Molletfamily, but there is really noway that his achievement canbe taken away from him.” As Le Nôtre’s epitaph (sup-posedly written by himself )read, he “had no rival.”

For all its shortcomings,when you finish this book,you do appreciate an enor-

mous amount – thatVersailles was conceived forone client by one man, aidedin design by several more;that it was constructed andmaintained by thousands;that hundreds of workers’lives were sacrificed; thatrivers were diverted, swampsdrained, tons of earthmoved, thousands of treesuprooted and transported,millions of flowers plantedthen discarded, new indus-tries created, treasure squan-dered, loves lost and found,the list goes on. It is a heckof a story, especially for agarden. If Thompson fallsshort of giving it the justiceit deserves, he has given it anoble try. – JosephDisponzio

Gardens: An Essay on theHuman Condition By Robert Pogue HarrisonThe University of ChicagoPress, 2008

We humanscontinue toravage ourplanet’sresources inthe shortsight-ed belief thatour rampantexploitation ofa natural boun-ty that onceseemed inex-haustible doesnot have fatal

consequences. While bothold and new industrial soci-eties rationalize the destruc-tion we are wreaking in thename of social bettermentand the economic benefits ofconsumerism, there is anuneasy sense that time isrunning out. Ironically, asour race against natureteeters on the brink ofcalamity, we are witnessingan explosion of garden writ-ing: magazine articles thatcater to landscape architectsand their clients, how-toperiodicals for gardeners,and coffee-table tomes withstunning color photographsof famous places. Gardens, byRobert Pogue Harrison, issomething different anddeeper: a meditation on therelationship between natureand human nature. LikeGaston Bachelard’s classicThe Poetics of Space, its text isinformed by poetry and phi-losophy.

Harrison, a professor ofItalian litera-ture atStanford, isinterested inorigins. Heencourages usto probe theetymology ofwords torepossess theirancient mean-ings. Take theword “horti-culture,”which most of

us use in its ordinary sense.Hortus is the Latin word forgarden, a defined space

where nature is cultivated.Dig for the Indo-Europeanorigins of “horticulture” andyou find gher, the word signi-fying an enclosure, such as ayard or orchard, an orderedprecinct set apart from therandomness of wild nature.“Culture” and “cultivate,” ofcourse, come from the sameroot: The noun means thecollective intellectual andartistic achievements of apeople, and the verb toimprove and prepare land, togrow and tend a crop.

Harrison’s earlier bookForests (1993) serves in someways as a companion toGardens. The forest, from theLatin forïs, meaning outside,is what is literally beyond thepale of civilization wherehumans dwell and where thearts as well as gardens arecultivated. It is the domainof the lost, a placelessexpanse whose sky-excludingcanopy obscures directional-ity. But the importance,indeed the necessity, of theforest cannot be denied.Epigraphically quotingGiambattista Vico – “Thiswas the order of humaninstitutions: first the forests,after that the huts, then thevillages, next the cities, andfinally the academies” –Harrison maintains that theforest is the primordialmatrix of civilization. Inclearing the forest we create

place from undifferentiatedwilderness. More than aclearing in the wilderness,the forest floor when turnedto humus – from the sameroot as “human” – is themedium in which agricultur-al societies as distant in timeand space as Bronze-AgeChina and colonial Americatook root. Conversely, byplanting gardens with trees,we claim place in partner-ship with the natural world.

In the realm of fairy taleand myth, the forest is atrackless darkness where theabominable lurks in theform of witches, wolves,giants, and evil spirits.Gardens, on the other hand,throughout human history,have been closely associatedwith paradise, which derivesfrom the Persian pairidaeza,signifying a royal huntingpark enclosed by walls. Theclassical garden is inhabitedby such goddesses as Flora,Pomona, and Venus, and inthe Judeo-Christian traditiona garden is the idyllic homecreated by God for the firstman and woman. Harrisonargues, however, that theEden inhabited so briefly byAdam and Eve is a false par-adise. Needing no cultiva-tion, its spontaneous bountydooms the first man andwoman to useless ease, pre-venting their advancebeyond an immature child-like state. Thus Eve’s leg-endary bite from the applewas not a sin but a means ofhuman liberation from the

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perfectly static garden creat-ed by a paternalistic God. Bycontrast, it is “the vocation of care,” personified by the Greek goddess Cura, thatgives meaning to humanexistence.

The garden is moreover apowerful metaphor forhuman salvation, God’s gracebeing intrinsic to our moralbeing rather than a gift fromon high. According toHarrison, “The gardens thathave graced this mortal Edenof ours are the best evidenceof humanity’s reason forbeing on Earth. Where histo-ry unleashes its destructiveand annihilating forces, wemust, if we are to preserveour sanity, to say nothing ofour humanity . . . seek outhealing or redemptive forcesand allow them to grow inus. That is what it means totend our garden.” In nour-ishing ourselves and oneanother, creating and procre-ating, sowing and reaping,we are able to realize our full mortal potential. Harri-son then calls upon suchphilosophers as Plato,Epicurus, Vico, Rousseau,and Heidegger, and suchpoets and writers as Dante,Boccaccio, Andrew Marvel,Rainer Maria Rilke, ItaloCalvino, Ludovico Ariosto,William Butler Yeats, WallaceStevens, Pablo Neruda, and

Malcolm Lowry to make thecase for the “fortunate fall,”the exchange of Eden’s ease-ful bliss for the redemptivegrace of garden sanctuariesof our own making.

In Gardens, Harrisonchooses the Czech writer andplaywright Karel Capek’s(1890–1938) charminglywhimsical little book TheGardener’s Year to illustratethe profoundly necessaryrelationship between humusand humanity. Capek maskswith humor the seriousnessof his underlying message ofthe importance of the “voca-tion of care.” Obsessed withthe frustrating vagaries ofnature, he knows that thecare of a garden teacheshumility, for nature can becruel in sometimes suspend-ing its ordinarily reliablegenerosity. For him “a realgardener is not a man whocultivates the soil. He is acreature who digs himselfinto the earth.” Yet the recal-citrance of hardpan createsan awareness of the amelio-rating role of humus, andthe loving care of the earthimplied by its application tosterile clay fosters the culti-vation of the soul as well asthe soil.

For each of the historicaland legendary gardens hediscusses, Harrison draws amoral lesson. Some gardensprovide a necessary removalfrom the everyday world forthe purpose of education inthe ways of adult responsi-bility. Plato’s Academy, set inits grove outside the city

walls, was perhaps the firstcountry campus. There, intemporary green seclusion,the youth of Athens wereinstructed in the philosophi-cal perspective and valuesnecessary to be good citizens,capable of responsibleengagement in the affairs ofthe polis. For Harrison,Kingscote Garden, a quietoasis on the Stanford cam-pus, is a personal haven forsensory awareness and con-templation. But, like Plato’sAcademy, it would lose its“essential tension” were itdevoid of relationship to theoutside world.

In contrast to bothKingscote and Plato’s Acade-my, the garden of thephilosopher Epicurus was adifferent kind of haven.Established like Plato’sAcademy on the outskirts ofAthens, it was not a breedingground for future statesmenbut rather a place of retreatin dark times, when with-drawal from the world wasnecessary in order to avoidthe ignominy of participat-ing in “the fracas and powerstruggles of the polis.” Thedisciples of Epicurean phi-losophy, like the apprenticesat Frank Lloyd Wright’sTaliesin, tended a vegetablegarden where they learnedthe lessons of Cura andbecame educated in the waysof nature. Contrary to thenotion that Epicureanism is

a hedonistic philosophy, theGarden of Epicurus was aplace where anxiety andapprehension were meant togive way to the more long-term and spirit-sustainingpleasures of patience, hope,and gratitude.

Versailles teaches theopposite, for here the vice ofpride – superbia – reignssupreme. Harrison findsLouis XIV’s desire to domi-nate nature repugnant. Forthat reason, the chapterdevoted to Versailles isintentionally brief; however,the author’s aversion shouldnot serve as an excuse forignoring the many volumesof valuable scholarship onthe garden of the Sun King. For example, he claimsthat André Le Nôtre, whodesigned the garden and itsnever-ending additions andconstant revisions, “musthave first sent in an army ofbulldozers to clear awaywhatever grew here, reducingthe grounds to a flat, emptyplane on which to projectthe master design.” Bulldoz-ers, for one thing, had not been invented in the sev-enteenth century, andLeNôtre’s plan, based onCartesian mathematicalprinciples, did not result in asingle monotonous groundplane, as Harrison wouldhave it; rather, its variouslevels and multiple axesallow for the garden’s opti-cally ingenious play withperspective. Nevertheless, thehistorical record supportsthe thrust of Harrison’s

argument: an army of con-scripted laborers createdVersailles, and during itsconstruction their death tollwas enormous. As an exam-ple, the name of the garden’slargest water body after theGrand Canal, the Pièce d’Eaudes Suisses, might well besaid to commemorate thehuge number of men of theSwiss Guard who died ofmalaria while excavating themarsh to create it. And it istrue that Versailles, in com-parison to its inspiration,Vaux-le-Vicomte, is a glori-ously wearisome sprawl. It isa garden symbolizing notonly Louis XIV’s hubris butalso the restlessness ofWestern civilization, whereenough is never enough.

Although every bit asinfluenced by the landscapedesigner’s art as Versailles,Japanese gardens such asSaiho-ji are examples ofnature enhanced rather thannature ruled. In contrast to Versailles’s role as a socialspace for courtly ritual,Saiho-ji, alternately knownas Koke-dera, meaning mossgarden, is a metaphor forAmida’s paradise, a spiritualenvironment for individualmeditation. The genius ofSaiho-ji and of Zen gardens,such as the famous karesan-sui (dry) garden Ryoan-ji, liesin the setting of stones. Thelarger, more vertical ones are

carefully positioned in subtlesymbolical arrangements,and the smaller, flatter onespartially buried in the earth,the unseen side consideredas animate as the one that is visible. At Saiho-ji, forinstance, Muso Soseki creat-ed a dry cascade of stones inthe upper part of the garden.This oxymoronic feature,like a Zen koan, was intend-ed as a means of frustratingrational thought in the inter-est of achieving a more intu-itive mode of understanding.In a similar manner a Zengarden will contain a singleOku stone, which is com-pletely buried, encouragingperception of the hidden.

Here the lesson Harrisonderives is in “the lost art of seeing.” Today’s world iscrowded with more visualstimuli than in any previousera, but the time that shouldbe taken for the slow revela-tions of true seeing is givenover to blind looking. Welook at high-definition televi-sion and spend hours eachday watching our computerscreens. But we do not seewhat is all around us. We livein a noisy world and arebombarded with distractingaural stimuli. People whohave become addicted to cellphones cannot activelyemploy their senses on aspringtime walk in CentralPark, much less in a Zen gar-den. Inevitably their atten-tion is drawn not to thevisible and invisible presence

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of leaf and stone in all theirrevealed and hidden dimen-sions, but rather to invisiblespeech directed into the earby satellite technology. Nordoes travel, where the inten-tion is clearly to sightsee,induce heightened percep-tion when a garden is cap-tured on the fly through thecamera’s viewfinder. Once itbecomes merely a stop on acrowded itinerary, the expe-rience of contemplative see-ing in which the viewer isengaged in a slow revelatorydialogue with the garden isno longer possible.

The ideal of serenity ver-sus the ideal of action isoften seen as a dualitybetween East and West. Thecontrast between Islam andChristianity is of a differentsort than that exemplified by the comparison of theZen garden and Versailles.Harrison devotes a chapterto describing the paradisefound in the Qu’ran and theone in the Bible. The Edenof Genesis is the locus ofdrama, a setting in which theaction of the story is all-important. While today weare prone to focus on mili-tancy as a defining aspect ofIslam, the Qu’ran portraysparadise in a very differentlight. For the Muslim, par-adise is a place of serenityand repose amidst the bless-ings of opulent beauty andsensuous delight, where therighteous “shall be lodged in

peace together amidst gar-dens and fountains.” ThisIslamic paradise has nodrama, only contentment,and its rewards are imaginedas physically real. It is thus afar cry from the eschatologi-cal paradise in Dante’s TheDivine Comedy, a series ofnine celestial spheres inwhich members of the com-pany of the blessed appearaccording to level of theirvirtue, the nature of theirformer sins, and the mannerof their atonement. Heredramatic tension is createdby the poet’s confession ofuncertainty that his wordswill be sufficiently rapturousto convey the increasingradiance and splendor of thesouls he meets in his ascenttoward the empyrean.

Harrison muses on theparadox of the coexistence ofpeace and jihad in the Mus-lim religion: “It is difficultfor us in the West to under-stand how the religion inwhose name so much vio-lence is unleashed these dayscan have peace as its highestideal. Even more challengingis to fathom how the demandfor peacefulness in Islammight be behind the greatupheavals. One of the majorchallenges in this regard isthe fact that in the West weare driven by desires verydifferent from the desire forpeace. That difficulty is com-pounded by our naïveassumption that the desiresthat drive us are universallyshared, whereas they are infact anything but universal

in nature. One day we willhopefully overcome this lim-itation and realize that it isnot so much our modernWestern values (freedom,democracy, gender equality,etc.) but rather the uncon-strained frenzy of the West –our relentless demand foraction, change, innovation,intervention, and a systemat-ic transgression of limits –that offends the very core ofIslam in the eyes of theextremists. Where paradise isimagined as a garden of per-fect tranquility, our incur-able Western agitation takeson a diabolical quality.”

Alas, it is with images ofan afterlife in the Qur’anicparadise that our contempo-rary jihad warriors seek theirmartyrdom, a place where“reclining face to face uponsoft couches, they shall beserved with a goblet filled ata gushing fountain, white,and delicious to those whodrink it . . . [and] sit withbashful, dark-eyed virgins, aschaste as the sheltered eggsof ostriches” (37: 46-49). Inopposition to this seeminglyirrational fanaticism, theWest falsely sees itself as asecular bastion of rationalpurpose rooted in democrat-ic justice. But as Harrisonobserves, “There is littledoubt that in the modern erastillness, repose, beauty, and harmony with the cos-

mic order no longer define,even in a hypothetical way,the ultimate end point of[Western] human desire.Desire now desires more ofitself, more of its own rest-lessness. . . . Thus we findourselves in the paradoxicalsituation of seeking to re-create Eden by ravaging thegarden itself – the garden ofthe biosphere on the onehand and the garden ofhuman culture on the other.”

These are dire words, forwe live in dire times. In thefinal analysis we are left withthe image of the garden ashumanity’s last, best hopefor survival. The tragedy ofthe present lies in our care-less degradation of nature.Thoreau said, “In wildness ispreservation of the world,”words that became the rally-ing cry of the environmentalmovement. But Harrisonpoints out that Thoreau’syear in the Walden woodswas never outside the cultur-al context of Concord andthat his cultivation of thegarden he planted there rep-resented “the vocation of care.” We need the gardenand all it represents nowmore than ever. We mustlearn to care not just in anemotional way but also literally, as stewards of theplanet. Cura shall lead theway. Her message is clear:you must care enough tocultivate your earthly mortalgarden – the only true paradise there is. – Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Calendar

International Conference on Japanese GardensOutside JapanMarch 26–29, 2009California State University,Long BeachIt is currently reckoned thatthere are Japanese gardensin at least 53 countries. InNorth America alone thereare approximately 250.Despite the ubiquity, scale,and complex social functionof these gardens, there is no forum for the directexchange of ideas aboutthem. To remedy this situa-tion, California StateUniversity, Long Beach,plans to host an internation-al conference devoted toJapanese gardens outsideJapan on its campus nearLos Angeles. The first andlast days will feature grouptours to major public andprivate Japanese gardens inthe Los Angeles area. Thetwo middle days of the con-ference will feature panels bygarden administrators,designers, educators, histori-ans, and maintenance

experts on topics includingdesign, restoration, collec-tion management, specialtymaintenance, fundraising,events, education, and thephilosophy of Japanese gar-dens outside Japan. Formore information, contactJeanette Schelin, Director of the Earl Burns MillerJapanese Garden, at jschelin@csulb.edu.

Foreign Trends on American Soil May 2010History of LandscapeArchitecture SymposiumUniversity of Maryland at College ParkThis symposium will be aforum for the discussion ofthe formation of a multifac-eted American tradition ofgarden and landscape designthat is based on the interpre-tation and adaptation oftrends imported into theUnited States from the eigh-teenth century up to the pre-sent. Topics of interest mayinclude the reception andlegacy of foreign horticultur-al and design literature aswell as the impact of thework of overseas designersand critics on contemporarypractice.

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Landscape and gardenhistorians are invited to sub-mit paper abstracts of nomore than 600 words byDecember 1, 2008. Abstractsare to be headed with theapplicant’s name, title of thepaper, professional affilia-tion, and contact informa-tion. Please send paperproposals to: Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto,Ph.D.Assistant Professor ofLandscape ArchitectureDepartment of Plant Scienceand Landscape ArchitectureUniversity of Maryland 2140 Plant Sciences Building College Park, Maryland 20742 e-mail: rfg@umd.eduph: (301) 405 4341fax: (301) 314 9308

Authors of accepted pro-posals will be required tosubmit the complete text oftheir papers to the sympo-sium chair by August 15,2009. Speakers will be askedto complete any revisionsand submit copies of theirpapers by March 2010.

Tours

In the Footsteps of Frank Lloyd Wright: The Gardens of JapanApril 16–30, 2009Frank Lloyd Wright traveledto Japan in the spring of1905. Now, over a hundredyears later, the Foundationfor Landscape Studies isoffering a study tour of gar-dens, waterfalls, shrines, andtemples that he visited andphotographed. Highlightsinclude visits to the Rikugi-en garden in Tokyo, theBuddhist shrines at Nikko,and the Kiyomizu-dera (PureWater Temple) in Kyoto. Alsoincluded are the Fujiya Hotel

where Wright stayed inHakone and lunch at theKanaya Hotel where hestayed in Nikko. The tourwill stray from Wright’s pathin order to visit gardens andbuildings that were not partof his itinerary, includingsome stunning new muse-ums. Participants will belimited to twenty. For a com-plete itinerary and registra-tion information, pleasecontact Elizabeth BarlowRogers: rogerseb@aol.com.

Contributors

Anthony Alofsin, Ph.D., AIA, isthe Roland RoessnerCentennial Professor ofArchitecture and a professorof art and art history at theUniversity of Texas at Austin.An architect, art historian,lecturer, and author ofnumerous books and essays,he is internationally recog-nized as a principal authorityon the architecture of FrankLloyd Wright. His mostrecent publication is WhenBuildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the HabsburgEmpire and Its Aftermath,1867-1933 (University ofChicago Press, 2006).

Kendall Brown, Ph.D., is aprofessor of art history atCalifornia State University,Long Beach. Trained inJapanese art history, he haspublished several books andnumerous exhibition cata-logues on modern Japanesepainting and woodblockprints. As a garden historian,he specializes in Japanesegardens outside Japan. Theauthor of Japanese-styleGardens of the Pacific WestCoast (Rizzoli International,1988), he is currently work-ing on a cultural history ofJapanese gardens in NorthAmerica.

Paula Deitz is editor of TheHudson Review, a magazineof literature and the artspublished in New York City.As a cultural critic, shewrites about art, architecture,and landscape design fornewspapers and magazineshere and abroad. Of Gardens,a collection of her essays,will be published in the nearfuture by the University ofPennsylvania Press.

Joseph Disponzio, Ph.D.,R.L.A., is a preservation land-scape architect with the NewYork City Department ofParks and Recreation. He hastaught at the HarvardGraduate School of Design,Bryn Mawr College, and theUniversity of Georgia. A spe-cialist in French picturesquegarden theory, he has pub-lished widely in the field oflandscape history. His mostrecent publication isTerritories: ContemporaryEuropean Landscape Design(Spacemaker Press, 2007).

Marc Peter Keane is a land-scape architect and writerbased in Ithaca, New York.He lived in Kyoto, Japan, foreighteen years, designinggardens for private individu-als, companies, and temples.His books include JapaneseGarden Design, an introduc-tion to the culture and aes-thetics of Japanese gardens;Sakuteiki, a translation ofJapan’s oldest gardeningtreatise; and The Art of SettingStones, eight essays on themeaning of gardens. Moreabout Keane’s work can befound at www.mpkeane.com.

Natsumi Nonaka is currentlya Ph.D. student in architec-ture at the University ofTexas, Austin. She has pub-lished papers on ancientRoman and Renaissance gar-dens, as well as Japanesetranslations of major workson Italian art and architec-ture and Greco-Romanantiquity. Within the contextof her interdisciplinary studyof landscape, she is focusingon the gardens of Italy andFrance in particular.

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Saiho-ji Moss Garden, Kyoto.

Volume iv, Number iFall 2008

Publisher:Foundation for Landscape Studies

Board of Directors:Kenneth I. HelphandRobin KarsonNancy NewcombTherese O’MalleyJohn A. PintoReuben M. RaineyFrederic Rich, ChairmanElizabeth Barlow RogersMargaret Sullivan

Editor: Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Associate Editor: Alice Truax

Assistant Editor: Margaret Sullivan

Copy-editor:Margaret Oppenheimer

Designer: Skeggs Design

Contributors:Anthony AlofsinKendall H. BrownPaula DeitzJoseph DisponzioMarc Peter KeaneNatsumi Nonaka

For more information about the Foundation for Landscape Studies, visitwww.foundationforlandscapestudies.org, or contactrogerseb@aol.com.

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