Japanese Garden (part 1)

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Japanese garden: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

• Japanese haiku garden
• Japanese garden in miniature
• Sakutei-ki

Japanese haiku garden

“A Japanese garden can be compared to a haiku poem. He reduces the complexity of the natural world to its essence in the garden " ¹said California-based landscape designer Mark Bourne, who uses native plants in the garden to capture the wabi feel - the poetic seclusion that characterized the 16th-century tea garden (tianiwa) culture. Tea houses - "chashitsu" at that time were located outside the cities and assumed escape from the bustle of city life and solitude in the countryside. This tradition is preserved and maintained in Japan to this day. Guests invited to the tea ceremony begin their journey to the tea house along a stone path ("roji"), which gradually leads the guest to the tea house, where the owner will prepare and serve tea according to the strict rules of the tea ceremony ritual.

The ideal Japanese tea garden is visible through the window as part and extension of the tea house or pavilion. People who are in it, sipping tea, relax at a table in the interior or in an armchair on a covered veranda. You can get aesthetic pleasure from looking through the window of a Japanese garden in any weather and at any time of the year, since Japanese gardens are designed in such a way that their composition takes into account the change of seasons.

Tea gardens vary in size and what is inside the garden. Depending on the desire and possibilities, the garden may contain trees, flowers, green plants, artificial waterfalls, streams, separately located stones or huge boulders. However, a tea garden can be created at very modest cost and in a very small area, and such modest gardens require minimal maintenance. If you wish, you can create a beautiful Japanese garden in the cramped conditions of an urban environment, on a small balcony of a city apartment, on a windowsill and even on a desk. If you choose a vantage point successfully, you can achieve the effect of being in a Japanese garden, and recharge your life-giving energy after the bustle and stress that our life is full of.

Japanese garden in miniature

While looking through old magazines, in the October 1930 issue of the American magazine Popular Mechanics, I came across an article by Bob Hartley on how to create a miniature Japanese garden myself. I liked the idea. I think that all those who also dream of their unique Japanese garden, but do not know anything about it or do not have a suitable land plot in order to set up such a life-size garden, will be attracted by the idea of creating a miniature, but real Japanese garden with living plants and a real pond, which will need to be looked after in the same way as a life-size Japanese garden.

An alternative solution would be to create a Japanese garden using artificial objects: an artificial bonsai tree, miniature artificial bushes, flowers, stones and sand. If someone is attracted by the idea of a miniature garden, then you can use figurines and components from the various models of the Japanese rock garden commercially available.

The main thing is that the garden that you will create should not leave the impression of chaotically collected figures, stones and plants that do not harmonize in size and proportions, which the Japanese will appreciate as a vulgar fake, and such a garden is unlikely to help us tune in to the atmosphere of relaxation and perception of beauty albeit a miniature, but a real Japanese garden.

Therefore, before you start creating such a miniature Japanese garden, you need to imagine what is invested in the concept of "Japanese garden", what elements it consists of, and what are the principles of its composition

Sakutei-ki

In the depths of a lonely heart

I feel that I must die

Like a pale dewdrop

On the grass of my garden

In the thickening shadows of twilight ²

Mistress Casa (VIII century)

Chinese Emperor Ying Zheng Qin Shi Huang (259-210 BC) went down in history as the ruler of the first centralized Chinese state, under which the Great Wall of China and a huge burial complex with the famous "terracotta army" was to accompany the emperor in the afterlife after his death. His name is associated with the birth of Chinese landscape painting and the creation of palace complexes surrounded by landscape parks, representing in a reduced size all corners of the vast domains of the first Chinese emperor.

During the reign of Qin Shi Huang, a peculiar art of "penjing" was born - the creation of miniature models of landscapes. In the following centuries, the art of creating miniature natural compositions from stones, sand and plants was further developed. During this period, the formation of various directions and schools of this art form began, which was continued in Japan, where, on the basis of knowledge brought from China about creating a harmonious environment and miniature models of "penzhin", new directions appeared, differing in technique and methods of displaying natural landscapes, such like bonsaki, suiseki, saikei, bonkei, and bonsai.

The first gardens appeared in Japan during the construction of large burial mounds there, called Kofun (300-552) ³ … In the Asuka area of Nara prefecture, during archaeological excavations, artificial streams and ponds formed from pebbles and cobblestones were discovered, which were built by Chinese craftsmen and resembled in structure large Chinese gardens with ponds. In the subsequent period of Nara (710-784), there are more and more such gardens and, most likely, local masters began to create them. The gardens of this period were distinguished by softer lines of the banks of streams and ponds, the banks of the ponds were not reinforced with stone walls, but had winding shoals and pebble beaches. In recent years, two gardens from that era have been restored in the city of Toin, Mie Prefecture and in the palace complex in the ancient capital of Japan, Heidze-Ke (8th century). The golden age of aristocratic Japanese gardens, when the development of garden architecture reached its apotheosis,falls on the Heian period (794-1185), the name of which can be translated as "calm, peace". The oldest surviving gardening manual "Notes on the organization of gardens" - "Sakutei-Ki", better known in Russian as "Treatise on Gardening" or "The Secret Book of Gardens", belongs to this period. This treatise has not lost its significance at the present time.

And almost all authors who wrote about Japanese gardens afterwards refer to this treatise. The spelling "Sakutei-Ki" is traditionally attributed to Tachibana Toshitsuna (1028-1094). Despite the fact that this period was marked by the construction of a large number of Buddhist temples and an increase in the number of practicing Buddhism among the Japanese population, in Sakutei-Ki the Shinto belief that all objects are sentient beings is applied to the composition of the garden. This concept, characteristic of the Heian period, is called "mono no avare", which literally translates as "pathos of objects." “Mono no avare” can also be translated as “awareness of transience”, “feeling of fleetingness”. A state that corresponds to such a feeling can be described as bitter joy that everything is fleeting, as well as sadness and longing that everything is transient. This feelingIt seems to me that the poetess of the early 8th century Kasa no Iratsume, also known as Mrs. Kasa, who wrote poems in the waka style, a Japanese genre of love lyrics popular in medieval Japan, was sensitively conveyed.

The knowledge and use of waka in correspondence was an indicator of the education and taste of the enlightened elite of the Heian era. Whoever the author of Sakutei-Ki was, it can be said about him that, like Mrs. Kasa, most likely, he was not a gardener, but was a courtier or a highly educated nobleman. The treatise tells about how to create a good garden, about the methods and rules for organizing gardens. Many of the concepts presented in the treatise are taken from Chinese books on gardening and horticulture. However, differences that are characteristic of Japanese garden art are already emerging. So, for example, repeating the rules of the Chinese science of harmony with the environment Feng Shui, which is essentially the Taoist practice of symbolic space exploration, the author of the treatise offers alternative solutions. According to the author, nine willow trees can replace a river,and three cypresses are a hill. The author believes that if the metaphysical rules are unreasonable and limit the creator of the garden, then they can be replaced with simpler and more flexible ones. This approach is typical for Japan, when ideas borrowed from other countries are changed so that they fit the Japanese and harmoniously merge into Japanese culture.

¹ Chadine Flood Gong, Lisa Parramore, Svein Olslund, "Living with Japanese Gardens"

² Translated by Z. L. Arushanyan

³ Patrick Taylor, The Oxford companion to the garden