Posts Tagged ‘Japanese Garden’
A Japanese Garden is Not Your Ordinary Garden
Japanese gardening is much different from the Western style garden. Most would say that a Japanese garden is far more soul soothing and inspires meditation. Japanese gardening is a cultural form of gardening that is meant to produce a scene that mimics nature as much as possible. Using trees, shrubs, rocks, sand, artificial hills, ponds, and flowing water the garden becomes an art form. The Zen and Shinto traditions are both a large part of Japanese gardening and, because of this; the gardens have a contemplative and reflective state of mind.
The basic methods of scenery in are a reduced scale, symbolization, and borrowed views. The reduced scale is the art of taking an actual scene from nature, mountains, rivers, trees, and reproducing it on a smaller scale. Symbolization involves generalization and abstraction. An example of this would be using white sand to suggest the ocean. Borrowed views refer to artists that would use something like an ocean or a forest as a background, but it would end up becoming an important part of the scene.
There are two types of Japanese gardening. The tsukiyami garden is a hill garden and mainly composed of hills and ponds. The hiraniwa, which is the exact opposite of the tsukiyami garden, is a flat without any hills or ponds.
Japanese Garden Design: The Practical Use of Stones and Boulders
There is a variety of elements used throughout a Japanese garden, but the three most important and basic ones that you will find in every garden design are: rocks, plants and water features. In this article, we are going to focus on rocks, a very visible and useful Japanese garden element that has many viable and practical applications, along with its aesthetic qualities.
- Large boulders can block unsightly views. For example, perhaps your water hoses and water connection are near an area of your garden and you don’t want it visible to visitors. A large boulder and complimentary bush would hide the out-of-place items, yet allow you access to use them as needed.
- Interesting rocks can be placed where plants are hard to grow. Sometimes you will find one particular area in your garden where plants just don’t seem to do well, no matter what you plant or what you do to the soil. Maybe it’s too wet or maybe it’s too clay based. Whatever the problem, a nice rock arrangement might do the trick.