Rankafu: Orchid Print Album

Japanese horticulture is known for intense specialization with certain plants; chrysanthemums are an example. Less well known is a more recent – less than one hundred years old – infatuation with orchids. Much of this is due to one man, Shataro Kaga (1888-1954), a banker by trade, who established a major orchid nursery at Oyamazaki near Kyoto in the 1920s.

Kaga hired a business partner who was skilled at orchid cultivation, while he concentrated on the promotion of the orchids grown and the hybrids developed at Oyamazaki. For marketing, he turned to the long practiced Japanese art of wood block printing. He was fortunate to find a skilled artist, Zuigetsu Ikeda (1877-1944) who created many watercolor images that were the basis for these prints.

This story and the art are captured in “Rankafu: Orchid Print Album,” a publication by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew featuring several authors. They argue that the practice of woodblock art, which has an equivalent form in Europe, reached an epitome in Japan. “The quartet of publisher, artist, carver, and printer all contribute to the quality of the woodblock print. It is rare that these four stars are in such perfect alignment that an exceptional example of this art form is created. The Rankafu woodblock print set is such a type example.”

It took long determination by Kaga to achieve his goal with the dangers for his country during World War II (and to himself, for his quiet opposition to the war). The prints were not issued until 1946 but became prized collector items. In “Rankafu,” the complete set of 83 prints are presented together along with many watercolors by Ikeda that were not developed into woodblocks. It is a beautiful book, but also a fascinating story of the intense, collective effort by many to produce lasting beauty.

Excerpted from the Summer 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Japanese Garden Design

Marc Peter Keane has published several books based on his landscape architecture degree from Cornell University and the 18 years he spent in Kyoto designing gardens. “Japanese Garden Design,” his earliest, has stood the test of time.

The first section is a well-illustrated introduction to broad concepts such as Zen gardens, tea gardens, and stroll gardens. The author emphasizes the context that led garden designers to create these “new forms of gardens and, more importantly, new ways of perceiving what a garden is” (author’s emphasis).

The final third of the book is about design: the principles, techniques, and elements. I wouldn’t recommend relying on this book for developing your own garden but rather for understanding the intentions of the creators of established gardens. In those intentions, Keane sees a myriad of perceptions, including the garden “as a living entity with a spirit, or by perceiving the garden as a painting, an object of contemplation, a spiritual passageway, or as a work of religious art.”

Excerpted from the Summer 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Flora Japonica

“Flora Japonica,” published by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is really two books in one. The first part provides a rarely documented history of Japanese botany with an emphasis on the literature and illustration of the native flora. The oldest surviving example dates from 1274 and surprisingly was intended to identify plants used by veterinary surgeons. It is considered to be very comparable to European works of the same era.

Botanical illustration flourished in Edo period (1603-1868), a time when Japan was politically stable and closed to other cultures. This book includes many beautifully reproduced examples of this era, again with many parallels in style to European publications of the same time, despite very limited interaction.

The main part of this book is a celebration of botanical illustration by Japanese artists of today. The nearly one hundred works were originally commissioned for an exhibit presented at Kew, “chosen to represent the unique richness of the Japanese native flora and the influence of Japanese plants on gardens in the West.” These works are beautiful for the artistry, and the extensive notes provide considerable botanical and horticultural background for the subjects.

Excerpted from the Summer 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Garden Plants of Japan

The four main islands of the Japanese archipelago stretch north to south at the same latitudes as from Portland, Oregon to northern shore of the Gulf of California. This range has given rise to a diverse flora including many species found nowhere else. If you include all the small islands, almost one-third of the 5,600 species found in Japan are endemic.

Unlike European and North American gardeners, the Japanese have historically relied heavily on their native plants for garden plantings. The focus of “Garden Plants of Japan” is on those plants of horticultural importance, including the development of many cultivars and hybrids. Also included are some important and even iconic plants that originated in nearby China and Korea.

The authors, Ran Levy-Yamamori, from Israel, and Gerard Taaffe, who learned horticulture in Ireland, England, and Scotland, bring an international perspective to their work. Both are fluent in Japanese and had long running gardening columns in “The Japan Times”, the most circulated English language newspaper in Japan.

This encyclopedia is, at first glance, much like others on recommended garden plants. It takes reading in depth to recognize the uniqueness of its subjects. What British or America garden encyclopedia would have a whole chapter on garden mosses? In what other book are all woody plants assessed for their suitability as bonsai subjects?

Each entry has the necessary information for successful garden culture and good design choices, but also fascinating reading about traditional uses in Japanese culture. For example, Lycoris radiata (higan bana in Japanese or spider lily in English) is “rarely planted in gardens because the red flowers remind people of the dead. However this flower is frequently found growing around Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples.”

Excerpted from the Summer 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

The New Zen Garden: Designing Quiet Spaces

For designing your own space in a Japanese style, consider “The New Zen Garden” by Joseph Cali, an American who lived many years in Japan, using his education as an interior designer. In this book, he urges his readers to treat the garden as an extension of the home’s indoor space, and is very practical and systematic in his advice.

For expertise in specific elements of the garden, Cali includes tutorials by Japanese landscape architects, artisans, and garden designers. Topics include lighting, building walkways and walls in traditional styles, and even how to arrange a dry waterfall.

Excerpted from the Summer 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Japanese Zen Gardens

Yoko Kawaguchi’s book “Japanese Zen Gardens” is excellent source of Japanese gardening history, but with a focus on the dry landscape (kare-sansui) traditions associated with Zen Buddhist temples. These sites bring the history alive with gorgeous photographs by Alex Ramsay and interpretive diagrams. While the dry landscape style may seem static to those outside Japan, Kawaguchi clearly shows an ongoing evolution, including its use for gardens not associated with temples.

This book would be excellent reading for planning or recalling a trip to Japan, especially if centered on Kyoto. While too large for a traveling guide, it is written in an instructive style for a visitor. Kawaguchi was born in Japan, but has lived much of her life in either North America or the UK, and has an ability to interpret and correlate both western and eastern aesthetics.

Kawaguchi focuses the latter half of her book on symbolism. This includes plant selection and, in some cases, removal. At the temple of Tōfuku-ji in Kyoto, all the ornamental cherry trees were chopped down around 1400. All the maples suffered the same fate in 1869, although these have mostly grown back. In both cases, the trees were considered a diversion. “Are they not perhaps too showy for a temple setting, making people think about temporal pleasures rather than reflect on the state of their souls?”

Excerpted from the Summer 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Niwaki: Pruning, Training and Shaping Trees the Japanese Way

Jake Hobson is a European author who moved to Japan. Although now returned to his native England, he writes “Niwaki: Pruning, Training and Shaping Trees the Japanese Way” from his experience in Japan, including working at an Osaka nursery.

“The reliance on trees and plants is no different from most other gardening cultures in the world, climate permitting. What is [author’s emphasis] different, however, is how the trees look.” These trees, or niwaki in Japanese, are “pruned to fit into the landscape of the garden in a way that is peculiar to Japan.”

Hobson thinks these practices can be adapted for Western gardens, but counsels his readers to not slavishly follow Japanese plant selection. Instead, he urges the gardener to apply the Japanese level of intensity in the care of garden trees, using species that flourish locally.

The author summarizes this intensity as an effort to create a “character of maturity” by “training and pruning branches to give the impression that they are larger and older than they actually are.” He then relates these practices to many of the Western traditions used on fruit trees to increase yields. This requires consistent and on-going pruning.

To illustrate these concepts, Hobson relies on mostly traditional Japanese garden trees but with some English examples. I came to the conclusion that this style might not suit everyone’s taste, but this book gives you an in-depth introduction to the concepts and the process of niwaki, and gave me a greater appreciation of this approach to gardening.

Excerpted from the Summer 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm

[Wilding] cover

Isabella Tree and her partner, environmentalist Charlie Burrell, own the 3,500-acre property known as Knepp Castle Estate. Her book Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm recounts the Knepp Wildland Project that took place over 18 years starting in 2000 after a failed effort to make the farm profitable with modern, intensive techniques. Their idea, inspired by a similar project in the Netherlands, was to undo many centuries of land management by introducing hardy large herbivores and then stepping back to see what would happen. The author defined it as: “Rewilding — giving nature the space and opportunity to express itself – is largely a leap of faith.” Take a look at a a 15-minute video of Tree introducing the concept.

This book was enjoyable to read because Tree describes various wildlife, birds, insects, mammals, and livestock from an amateur’s enthusiastic perspective rather than with a dispassionate scientific voice. Tree keeps the pace of the narrative moving, yet provides enough details of animals, ecology, history and even governmental regulations that the reader understands why they choose to rewild despite considerable obstacles.

Her narrative of the slow evolution of rewilding their large property takes place over three decades. The story of the farm pasture and woods, neighbors, various national agencies and the wider economy is interspersed with detailed accounts of rare birds, land-use history, heritage breeds of livestock, and the inner workings of ecological interdependence. Tree’s special fondness for the turtle dove is appropriate: nearly extinct in Britain, it is thriving at Knepp.

The role of plants is integral to animal habitat. Tree learns that animals, specifically large herbivores and predators, directly contribute to remaking plant communities which then evolve to support even more species of wildlife. Their philosophy could be boiled down to: increase biodiversity, stay hands-off, build resiliency — repeat!

Neighbors and their notions of a tidy, well-cared-for, pastoral landscape proved to be the most vociferous opponents of allowing their land to revert to a wild state. Tree attempts to understand their unease by looking into the social and psychological impact of living in a controlled, tidy, managed environment. Neighbors saw the Knepp project as abuse and gross negligent abandonment. The author remarks how the oldest neighbors remember the hedgerows and all the birdsong now absent in the agriculturally productive countryside. She also repeatedly points out how their land is marginal and even with modern equipment, chemicals and “improved” breeds they could never make a profit. She wonders why farmers, and governments through subsidies, spend so much on producing food when so much of it wasted, thrown away, uneaten by consumers or worse, never even making it to market because of the low prices received for commodity crops.

Readers interested in regenerative agriculture, ecological restoration and climate change mitigation will find Wilding an inspiring source of hope.

Published in the Leaflet, June 2020, Volume 7, Issue 6.

Naturalizing Bulbs

In “Naturalizing Bulbs”, Rob Proctor does not provide the usual alphabetical recital of genus, species and varieties. Instead, he begins with a series of essays on the aesthetics and practicalities of weaving bulbs into the landscape. These chapters both inspire and provide a dose of reality of what works, based on broad climate zones throughout the United States.

Next, he steps back and looks season to season, again considering the pros and cons of choices for different regions. These two approaches give the reader a clear understanding of the decisions we each need to make for our own gardens.

Proctor is an aficionado, writing about the varieties he knows well. He doesn’t list all you could plant, but rather what you should plant – classics that combine beauty with health and garden reliability.

Published in Garden Notes: Northwest Horticultural Society, Summer 2020

Olmsted in Seattle : Creating a Park System for a Modern City

[Olmsted in Seattle] cover

Most people in Seattle know that the name Olmsted is connected to the city’s landscapes. This elegant book presents both the context and the details of that connection. The text is clear and engaging, and the photographs and maps are handsome as well as instructive. For the many landscape designs, the reader may want to keep a magnifying glass at hand to help with details.

Two popular movements help explain how Seattle movers and shakers came to hire and support the plans of the far-off and famous Olmsted Brothers, a Brookline, MA firm. Most significant was the City Beautiful Movement, which spread the idea that any city worth anything needed to be beautiful. The other was the Playground Movement, which encouraged cities to develop many playgrounds, so that even poor children could grow up healthy and “moral.”

Olmsted in Seattle carries the reader chronologically through the planning and execution of plans for many of the city’s parks and boulevards. John C. Olmsted, who visited Seattle and created plans in 1903 and 1908, was the nephew (and stepson) of Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., of New York’s Central Park fame. Ott shows the progress, the politics involved, and the compromises necessary to carry out the plans. One compromise: In 1909 John Olmsted noted that walkways should have been included parallel to several drives, including Lake Washington, Montlake, and Washington Park. In our current need for more such paths for bikes and pedestrians, we can surely wish those had been built.

“Borrowed landscapes” were a major part of Olmsted’s planning. He designed each park to take advantage of its natural contours, but especially to use views of mountains, water, and other vistas to make the park seem larger than it was. The gorgeous mountain and water views from Fort Lawton, for instance, informed Olmsted’s plea to acquire it as a park, a wish only fulfilled years later with the inclusion of Discovery Park.

Near the end of the book Ott shows how the concepts that Olmsted promoted, such as curved paths, have been adapted in the decades afterward, so that the Olmsted influence continues.

The whole history depicted in Olmsted in Seattle is worth reading. On the other hand, readers in a hurry can just use the excellent index to trace the history of their favorite parks. Or they can just page through, admiring the photos, informational side bars, and awesome maps.

Published in The Leaflet, Volume 7, Issue 5, May 2020.