Kristina and the Tours
Kristina Taylor is a garden historian and writer. She organises and accompanies all the tours with a Japanese speaking guide. Here is a recent article she has written for the Gardening Journal, Hortus describing the experience.
A Tour of Japanese Gardens
Hortus, vol. 22, no. 1, Spring 2008
Nothing prepares you for the burst of wow, you experience, when you visit the Kinkaku-ji and its garden in Kyoto and it is for this very reason we started our tour there. Its entrance, most certainly not the original, is modest and unassuming.
Suddenly the kyoko-chi, mirror pond, with its islands, tiny trees and shrubs is revealed with a glittering gilded pavilion as the centrepiece. The whole is framed by larger trees and a backdrop of wooded hills. A heron standing still in the water catches your attention and a wave of serenity overcomes you. The reflections of the autumn colours, which are almost perfect, are so beautiful it is hard to believe that you are truly looking at nature.
We spent four days in this ancient and charming city looking at a variety of its finest gardens to observe and attempt to learn about Japanese gardens. The process is like a slow unpeeling of ideas, moods and understanding which I suspect is never completed. It is important to allow yourself to respond emotionally on your first visit because some of the gardens can be puzzling to our Western eyes to begin with. This was so for me at the most famed Zen garden, Ryoan-ji, with 15 stones in raked sand. No matter where you look from, only 14 are ever visible at any time. But sitting on the verandah quietly reflecting, I found the composition taking over. Nearby is a unique stone wash basin with “I learn only to be contented” written in Japanese characters. Unlike the shakkei, borrowed landscape, of the Golden Pavilion which adds to its beauty, this small garden is enclosed by wonderful aburadobei walls made from clay boiled in oil. They complete the mood within it by blocking the outside. The disordered pattern, like waves, on the walls, created by chemicals seeping through, contrast with the disciplined order of the raked sand around the stones.
These contrary elements run through the whole of Japanese culture, where opposites serve to make up the whole. For instance a meal will be served with smooth lacquer bowls alongside rough pottery, both intrinsically beautiful and a necessity for its enjoyment. So experiencing a Japanese meal every day, at lunch, was very much part of our tour and in a quirky way was part of the process of appreciating and understanding the gardens.
Another small temple garden we visited was Daisen-in, the Great Hermit Temple, where a charming old monk, the last of his sect, is in charge. The meaning of this exquisite yet tiny garden which wraps around three sides of the central building is well known, representing an idealized landscape painting. The composition begins in one corner with rocks depicting Mount Horai. From between them runs a dry river which flows through a miniature landscape, dividing to pass westwards round an island shaped like a turtle and eastwards past one in the shape of a crane. The river runs around a ‘boat’ rock, opening out into the ocean, a sea of carefully raked gravel with two cones and a single tree. Such is the serenity of this scene it is difficult to drag oneself away. On a scroll nearby is the following:
EACH DAY IN LIFE IS TRAINING
TRAINING FOR MYSELF
LIVING EACH MOMENT
EQUAL TO ANYTHING
READY FOR EVERYTHING
I AM ALIVE – I AM THIS MOMENT
MY FUTURE IS HERE AND NOW
FOR IF I CANNOT ENDURE TODAY WHEN AND WHERE WILL I?
SÕEN OZEKI
Chinese culture, landscape and paintings are still being used for inspiration in the creation of gardens in Japan, as they have been for the last 1300 years. The setting for the Miho museum in an area of outstanding natural beauty and nature reserve was influenced by the Chinese classical poem, Peach Blossom Valley, in which a fisherman discovers paradise on earth by entering a cave and emerging into a beautiful valley on the other side. Taking this theme of Shangri-la the distinguished Chinese architect I.M.Pei has built a modern museum carved into the deeply forested landscape in glass and steel, decorated inside with warm beige-coloured limestone from France. It is approached up a drive, lined with peach trees, leading to a curved stainless steel tunnel cut into the ridge. There is a sense of anticipation walking through the calm and silent curve, the end not in sight. And then the exit comes into view followed by a suspension bridge leading to the round moon-gate entrance of the museum pavilion beyond, framed by delicate autumn coloured acers. The setting thus satisfies one of the tenets of the philosophy of the Shumeikai sect, owners of this place, that spiritual fulfilment is found both in art and nature.
Another garden we salivated over in Kyoto was Katsura, an Imperial stroll garden completed in 1615 for the Emperor’s younger brother. It is considered the most exquisite of all the private residence gardens in Japan. It is impossible to describe how wonderful it is. Each turn of the head and each step forward gives you a new picture, a new delight, without the feeling that it was all too much. Like the small portions in a Japanese meal, beautifully presented and each with their own delicious flavour but never so much that you feel full, the crescendo of pleasure and satisfaction builds up and up as you walk around until you come to the moon-watching platform adjunct to the villa. Here you realise that there is another level of knowing that you can only imagine. Oh to be kneeling here on a warm evening, in a kimono, as the moon rises sending a reflection on to the still pond, the sound of a bamboo flute playing nearby.
Leaving Kyoto we took a number of trips on the fast and efficient Bullet trains. The longest ride taking us west and south across the inland sea to Takamatsu the largest town on Shikoku Island. The breathtaking ride, viewed through the front windows of the train, takes you over a series of bridges, hopping from one tiny island to another. Here we came to the Garden Museum of Isamu Noguchi, one of the 20th century’s most significant sculptors and also a garden maker. On searching for the meaning of sculpture he said:
‘This I had found in the rocks of gardens as the essential projection of time. Trees pass, rocks remain. Erode. How else may the enduring be manifest?’
The museum is his house and garden, a vast stone dyke circle in which he worked and about 200 of his works, some unfinished. We were lucky to meet his chief stone cutter Izumi, now a distinguished sculptor in his own right, who took us to sit in Noguchi’s house in front of the enigmatic piece Wave in Space, carved from African black granite. Our Japanese guide was impressed since even though she had visited a dozen times before she had never been invited into the inner sanctum.
In contrast to this we visited the finest of Japan’s stroll gardens, Ritsuren in Takamatsu, nestling below Shuinsan, the Purple Cloud Mountain. This style of garden was directly inspired by classical Imperial Chinese landscape gardens and many were created by Japanese war lords.
A number survive because they were made into public parks in the mid 19th century and the irony is that if we want to know what Chinese gardens looked like it is to Japan we have to travel. Appreciation of a garden is as important while sitting inside a tea house looking out as it is strolling around, and so we took tea in the moon-scooping pavilion, originally built in 1640.
We sat cross legged on the smooth polished wooden verandah, which hung over the lake, the railing dipping at the ends to give one the impression of being in a small boat. As I looked out over the lake, a heron perched on a rock, a curved bridge in the distance, the shimmering of the water and the sound of the gently lapping ripples gave me the illusion that I was actually floating.
Our final journey on a tiny railway was to Japan’s holiest mountains Mount Koya. This extraordinary valley high in the mountains south of Osaka is a place of pilgrimage. The main temple garden has the largest dry garden in Japan, two dragons in a sea of gravel created from 140 granite rocks from Shikoku, which wraps around the central tea house. The temple also houses a remarkable collection of 16th century screens, some in black and white, showing both fabulous flower and landscapes scenes. Later we wandered through the vast cemetery, with over 200,000 graves the oldest from the 10th century.
Towering cryptomeria trees, many reputedly over 1000 years old, allow a little direct sunlight to flicker through. Moss hangs in drapes over the stones. Surprisingly it is not a gloomy place at all. At the top of the valley is a temple celebrating Kobo Daishi, the founder of the Shingon sect of Buddhism who first came here in the 9th century. Nearby is a building housing 10,000 lights, now electrified but none-the-less extraordinary, which are part of a ritual of flowers and lights.
So our last day ending with dinner in Osaka typified the opposing elements which make Japan; the supreme serenity and peace of the cemetery and the flashing lights and phrenetic pace of the city. A most intriguing and worthwhile journey in every sense.