Japanese Gardening

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Japanese Gardens - One Continuous Art-Piece

I love the way japanese gardens look. Japanese gardening is all about mimicking mother nature as good as you can by using trees, rocks, ponds, man-made hills and patches of sand and of course flowing water in such a way that it resembles pure art! Shinto and Zen traditions are a large part of Japanese gardening and are usually symmetrical and very neatly put together. Everything must be in order and must look peaceful. It's a more meditational way of gardening and is definitely a more soul soothing one.

Japanese Gardening Consists Of Three Basic Ways Of Making Their Landscapes

The first is making everything on a smaller scale, like waterfalls, mountains and rivers. Then there's a way of generalization and being abstract, like using white sand to represent the ocean. Then you've got borrowed views who refer to something like a forest as the background, but then the background would become one of the more important parts of the landscape.

And to complicate it a bit further, there are two styles, two ways of Japanese gardening. The first one is called tsukiyami (let me check if I spelled it correctly... yep) and this one is made up of hills and ponds and something outsiders just call it a hill-garden. Then the second one (which has a slightly easier name) is called hiraniwa and that is exactly the opposite of tsukiyami. It's a flat garden. No hills. No ponds, everything as flat as possible.

Japanese Gardens Are As Natural As Possible

When it comes to the things they use in Japanese gardening, you can probably guess that it's all as natural as possible. They'll work with rocks and gravel. And they'll use water, fences, hedges and stones. As well as moss. To bring spirituality to the garden, rocks are commonly used as the centerpiece of the garden. The Shinto tradition tells us that rocks embody nature's spirits and therefore they receive a better place in the japanese garden. With gravel, they usually make those curly waves to simulate those of water and they use stones as a way to create boundaries and sometimes are even sculpted into different forms. Water is another essential thing, wether we are talking about a waterfall, a stream or a pond, it's still an essential part of Japanese gardening because it brings balance to the entire Japanese garden.
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Japanese Gardens And Bonsai

Of the typical plants that are used in a Japanese garden, Bonsai is without a doubt one of the most famous and typical ones. Bonsai is the art of getting tiny trees like cedar, maple and cypress (just to name a few of them) to look large and old, while still keeping them in a miniature version. These can be as short as a couple of inches to as high as 3 feet or a bit more and are kept that small by pruning them, transporting them to other pots, pinching their growth and wiring their branches.

Muso Soseki, a poet, once said "Gardens are the root of transformation" and when it comes to Japanese gardening, I couldn't agree more. The mental change you go through, the different feelings and the experience. It all becomes one big transformation.