Japanese Gardening: A Practical Guide to Creating a Japanese-Style Garden with 700 Step-By-Step Photographs

“Japanese Gardening: A Practical Guide” provides a long-needed book on how to apply the principles of Japanese style gardens on a small scale, allowing the incorporation of Japanese garden elements in a home garden.

This is done with a collection of projects that will engage the do-it-yourself gardener, and allow as little or much Japanese influence as desired. Author Charles Chesshire and photographer Alex Ramsay “show you how to create a beautiful and individual Japanese garden.”

Excerpted from the Fall 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Kenga Kuma: Portland Japanese Garden

I recently visited the Portland Japanese Garden after many years away, taking a tour in June 2019 as part of a Hardy Plant Society of Oregon study weekend. The focus was the new part of the garden, the Cultural Village, which opened in 2017, but I also made time to explore the earlier areas that date from 1967.

In June 2020, I enjoyed a keynote presentation by Stephen Bloom, the CEO of the Portland Japanese Garden as part of the virtual American Public Garden Association annual meeting. He stressed that the garden is a cultural entity and much more than just a horticultural collection. The Cultural Village, that includes a café, gallery, library, and learning center, is one expression of that vision, allowing the visitor to experience a broad range of Japanese arts and culture.

“Kengo Kuma: Portland Japanese Garden” is a substantial new book that tells the story of the Portland Japanese Garden, both old and new, that is written by Botond and Balázs Bognár, father and son Hungarian-American architects. Kengo Kuma is the noted Japanese architect and professor of architecture at the University of Tokyo who was hired to design the Cultural Village.

The authors begin with excellent recounting and appreciation of the original garden, and one of the best summarization I’ve read of both the Shinto and later Buddhist religions in Japan and their impact on Japanese art and design. “The symbiotic relationship between the new and the old alters them both and arguably for the better.”

The older site includes five different styles of Japanese garden design, an unusual trait as gardens in Japan are typically in a single style. These five designs are widely spaced, so that each has its own integrity – qualities well-captured by the images of several photographers.

This book is also the story of how the scope of the garden has grown. CEO Bloom, who was hired in 2005, brought an unusual background as a music educator and non-profit manager. He recognized it is easy to get caught up with the horticulture, the politics, the science – but the garden is really all about people. To hone this focus, he restructured the management, upgrading the Garden Director to Garden Curator, and creating a peer Curator of Culture, Art, and Education.

This made the Cultural Village possible. Kuma writes in his introduction: “I wanted to create a special architecture and place that also did not belong solely to either culture; it would be neither entirely American nor completely Japanese.” This approach is illustrated by the choice of building materials for the new buildings. The interiors are primarily the wood of Port Orford cedar (Chamaecyparis lawsoniana), an Oregon native, crafted by Portland builders, but as “a symbolic counterbalance,” the main doors were made from Japanese wood, constructed in Japan.

Another example of synergy was solving the need for a retaining wall in the courtyard to keep the steep hillside in place. The project team asked the question, why settle for a utilitarian solution? Castle walls are an ancient tradition in Japan, but new castles are rarely built and artisans who maintain existing walls are few. However, Bloom was able to find a stonemason, who was of the 15^th generation of a stonemason family, and able to build a new wall in the old tradition, creating a delightful feature that serves a necessary function.

Excerpted from the Fall 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Spirited Stone: Lessons from Kubota’s Garden

I had the opportunity to visit the Kubota Garden in southeast Seattle last fall as part of a staff enrichment day for the University of Washington Botanic Gardens. It was my first visit in decades, a time in which I have visited many notable public gardens throughout North America and in parts of Europe. For all my travels, I had been overlooking a garden treasure very close to home.

My enjoyment from that visit was enhanced by learning that a new book, “Spirited Stone: Lessons from Kubota’s Garden,” was in production. It is amazing!

A major part of this book is a biography of Fujitarō Kubota (1879-1973) with contributions by several different authors. Growing up in a rice farming family on one of the smaller Japanese islands, he was mostly self-taught in botany and the aesthetics of gardening. His humble background precluded him from being trained in the rigid traditions of designing Japanese gardens.

He left his family and after several stops, he completed his emigration to Seattle in 1910. He eventually purchased five acres in the Rainier Valley but only with help, as a Japanese citizen he was not allowed to own property outright. That was the beginning of the garden he developed and nurtured for the next 50 years. It was also the base for his livelihood as a garden designer and installer, and the site for growing his extensive nursery stock.

Kubota created demonstration gardens along a roadway that allowed customers to drive through and choose their favorites from various garden vignettes, which he would reproduce at their homes. A typical contract included the expected details of construction and landscape materials, but the choice of plantings were at the discretion of Kubota. His story captures much of the history of garden design practices and nurseries in Seattle in the first half of the 20^th century.

Kubota’s garden also became a center for the Issei, or first generation Japanese community, and the many immigrant and minority communities that settled in the Rainier Beach neighborhood. Critical to nurturing this cooperative spirit were Kubota’s spiritual beliefs. He was a practitioner of Konkōkyō, a 19^th century development out of Shinto and Buddhist animistic traditions. From this comes his understanding of the spirited stone of the book’s title. One of the books essayists, Jason Wirth, summarizes this quality: “The garden nourishes and heals because it channels a kind of archaic earth awakening.”

The richness of this book is the mix of essays written in prose or poetry, or expressed in photographs, by many different authors from a variety of backgrounds. Some are by the expected landscape architects and historians, while other chapters reflect personal journeys, influenced by the garden, written by noted members of the Asian-American, African-American, or mixed race communities in the neighborhood or the region.

Many of these stories are stark, including the incarceration of Kubota and his family during World War II and his heartbreak of coming back to a neglected garden. But this story also shows his strength, in designing a garden at the prison camp in Minidoka, Idaho, and tackling the hard work of restoring the Seattle garden upon his return.

It is difficult to select a primary author for this book, but for the excellence of the extensive photographs, the Library of Congress record appropriately gives credit to Gemina Garland-Lewis. Historical photos further enhance the reader’s enjoyment, as do the quiet, black-and-white images by Nathan Wirth. The whole of “Spirited Stone” is best captured by writer Betsy Anderson: “Kubota Garden is a complex palimpsest of culture and nature that merits examination from an almost endless number of perspectives.”

Excerpted from the Fall 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

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

The Japanese Garden

[The Japanese Garden] cover

Sophie Walker trained as a garden designer in Britain, displaying her skills to acclaim at the epitome of English gardening institutions: the Chelsea Flower Show. To broaden her design skills, she studied Japanese style gardening. She describes her new book, “The Japanese Garden,” as essentially a workbook of those studies.

The author presents a series of chapters on different themes with essays by others from many backgrounds interspersed and augmenting her studies. Topics vary widely, from our relationship with nature or the tenets of Buddhism as they apply to gardens, to the use of courtyard gardens or favorite flowers and trees. Concluding each of her chapters are photographs of gardens that embody concepts she presents.

Throughout, she looks for connections or contrasts with Western (European and American) traditions, or how icons of Western design or art have been influences by Japanese traditions, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Claude Monet and, in present day, David Hockney. She observes, “visiting a Western cultural landmark – a palace or cathedral – cultural and historic context is unavoidable. But in the Japanese garden, context is deliberately confused, as is scale.”

Excerpted from the Fall 2018 Arboretum Bulletin.

Japanese gardens and landscapes, 1650-1950

Japanese gardens and landscapes book cover Wybe Kuitert has written two deeply researched books on the history of Japanese gardens. The first, “Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art” (1st edition 1988, revised 2002 – this later edition is at the Miller Library), is the history from roughly 900 to 1650 CE, concluding when “the practice and theory of garden art became established in a way that does not differ much from our own days.”

Kuitert’s new book, “Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 1650-1950,” brings that history up to near present day. Despite his conclusion in the earlier book, I found this history surprisingly dynamic. During the Edo period (1603-1868), gardens of the “daimyo,” or regional rulers, became quite fanciful. “These were Disney-type re-creations that functioned primarily as leisure environments.”

This was also a time when variegated plants and flowers with unusual and flamboyant forms became popular. As printing techniques became more widely and cheaply available, there was an explosion of published gardening books, codifying some of the earlier customs but with a loss of their symbolism. Kuitert laments this, describing these books as only a “crowd-pleasing version of garden traditions and ideas.”

After Japan opened to the West in the mid-1800s, there was much upheaval in all ways of life, including gardening. Western-style gardens appeared and Japanese garden designers who studied in the West were in high demand.

For local readers, this book’s profile of Jūki Iida (1889/90-1977), the major designer of the Seattle Japanese Garden, will be of great interest. Kuitert reviews Iida’s early training and his developing understanding that there exist two worlds of Japanese gardening: the formal, built garden and the naturalistic garden. By his emphasizing the latter approach, Kuitert credits Iida as “a key figure in democratizing the long tradition of garden-making in Japan” and for making individual gardens more accessible to everyone.

Excerpted from the Fall 2018 Arboretum Bulletin.

Seattle Japanese Garden

The website for the Seattle Japanese Garden at the Washington Park Arboretum has information about visiting, an event calendar and a blog with articles about the garden.