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herb_gw

Useful gardening books - and some comments about Zen

Herb
19 years ago

Most of us, probably, have only modest-sized gardens. Among many books about Japanese-style gardening, there's one called Japanese Gardening In Small Spaces. The title makes it sound especially useful to us would-be Japanese garden enthusiasts, and the book is often recommended. But, compared to other books, I've been wondering just how useful it is to those of us who just have modest-sized gardens.

So I've been leafing through it - and our various other books. To my surprise, I think I have to conclude that for somebody with an ordinary-sized back yard, there's more useful information about positioning rocks, placing lanterns, making paths and small ponds and about shrub arrangements in an even more modest book called The Art of Zen Gardens - a Guide to their Creation and Enjoyment. It's by A.K.Davidson and it's published by G.P.Putnam's Sons, New York.

Others that I've been leafing through are -

Space & Illusion In The Japanese Garden, by Teiji Itoh. A passage in it that got my attention reads - "....Zen priests advocated the use of materials near at hand rather than the expenditure of large sums of money to procure and transport fantastically shaped rocks and rare trees. Indeed Buddhism itself is symbolized in this frugal advice, and it was of such a philosophy that the rock garden and the dry-landscape (kare sansui) garden were born." (my italics). "Frugal" certainly appeals to me.

The Magic Of Trees And Stones by K.Saito and S.Wada. The illustrations and pictures in this book are all in black and white, but it's full of good stuff.

Japanese Gardens Revisited is largely of photographs by Kiichi Asana with commentary by Gisei Takakuwa. The photographs are in colour and I can spend a lot of time admiring them, but most of them are on a grander scale than most back yards, so, (for me) it's of limited use.

Oriental Gardening, published by the Japanese Gardening Society of Oregon has lots of colour photographs too, and they're very pleasant to look at, but many of them are just pictures of individual shrubs or flowers, or else of some part of a larger-scale garden. Still it does have some brief advice for the likes of us - "If the space is limited, it is more efficient to choose a Zen dry garden or a courtyard garden......"

Finally, The Garden Art Of Japan, by Masao Hayakawa. It has some striking pictures. There are a few colour plates, but the rest of the pictures are in black and white. To me, one of the most powerful pictures is one of the stone arrangement in the upper garden, Saiho-ji, Kyoto. The author writes of it as "...a crystallization of the spirit of the great priest Muso Soseki - a spirit that truly revolutionized Japanese garden design in the medieval age." A little further on, he refers to the upper garden as representing "the deeply ascetic outlook of Zen....." Chapter 4 is entitled 'The World Of The Dry-Landscape Garden and the sub-heading 'Gardens for Zen Discipline'. It begins - "Muso Soseki attempted to give physical form to his Zen Philosophy in the dry-landscape garden of Saiho-ji and the dry waterfall stone group in the garden of Tenryu-ji. Such gardens are in themselves a means towards Zen self-examination, spiritual refinement and ultimate enlightenment. They therefore belong to a dimension of creativity entirely different (my underlining) from that of gardens designed for pleasure or for the gratification of aesthetic tastes......"

I found it difficult to put the book down.

If you don't have a copy of either The Art Of Zen Gardens, or The Garden Art Of Japan, I recommend you get them.

Herb

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