Building Japanese Gardens

J. Skuba, Ph.D. Principal ZOEN SEKKEI-SHA+ASSOCIATES

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35 to 400 square foot Gardens

Home Owners Seek Smaller Japanese Gardens. Why ? Everything needed to construct Japanese style Spaces have become very expensive. Value remains the same, Price becomes outrageous.

Scaling down gardens into affordable sizes are ways to still savor the Japanese style garden. Supply chains impact availability of stone lanterns and basins. Early on stone ornaments came from Japan. As those ornaments became more expensive, much making of stone ornaments were then constructed in Taiwan. Ultimately those ornaments made there became too expensive causing production to migrate to mainland China.

With supply chains with China degrading making traditional styles stone ornaments difficult to obtain. So, many gardens I now design are without traditional stone ornaments. The Basic elements of Stone, Water, and Plants, are still utilized to capture the spirit of the Japanese style garden.

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Back in the U.S.A.

After 9 years hiatus,

I'll be posting "stuff" regarding

Japanese styled Gardens and Gardening Art.

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November 6-7, 2015, on-site Aesthetic Pruning Hands-on Workshop.  This was an opportunity for ISA Certified Arborists and Experienced Pruning Volunteers to improve their pruning skills.  Conducting this workshop gave me the perfect venue for sharing my 50 years of Horticultural Ken and working the Meridians of the Japanese Gardening Aesthetic with other attendees. The weather was perfect and an enormous amount for pruning was done over the two day session.

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Niwaki no Sentei    Pruning in different styles suited to the character of the tree.  Professionally speaking, this type of pruning style is call Aesthetic Pruning, the intention is to bring out the natural character of the tree.  The character of a tree is its branching form from the trunk outward to the tip, texture of the bark, balancing the greenery with the woody branches.  The proportion ratio of green to woody is about 2/3 : 1/3  according to the pruners aesthetic eye.

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The Engawa is the threshold that introduces the way from inner space to outer space. This is the Sukiya Way, the joining of Inside, Outside and the Person. It is Here, There, and Now,

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The Illusion of depth with a central vanishing point, using successive layers going from public space outside into the private inner sanctum. Change the width of the walkway and depth is enhanced.  This, in my opinion, is a very welcoming entryway that slowly reveals that which is concealed unfolds..

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Speaks For Itself

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Some More about WABI-SABI

Wabi-Sabi is a quiet aesthetic ideal, a sensitive state of mind.  Its true essence to be seen, looking beyond the apparent, looking within. . . in physical terms it is like explaining the taste of some food by its color and shape.  It requires one learning to see the invisible stripped of all that is unnecessary, and knowing where to stop.

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Days becoming longer, Winter on the wane. . .Soon Sakura.

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Winter,  the time of beautiful Snow Scenes in Japanese Gardens

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Sudare:   Matchstick roll blinds to control bright sunlight without restricting air flow.  Also use to obscure a view, frame a view, capture shadows, a little bit of privacy, and subdue wind. Since it is brighter outside than inside, no one can see in thus maintaining visual privacy.

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The stone cliff with waterfall is constructed of synthetic stone, a mixture of concrete and chopped fiberglass filaments.  Stains added to simulate aging and weathering.

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Rice Fields, Man-made planting sites taking generations of effort to create.

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Monochrome Color

Shades of Green and Gray make for a restful garden that fades into the wider landscape.  Garden Complexity is via different leaf size and textures, some plants sheared, others more relaxed maintained by "snip-by-snip" pruning, preserving the essence of form and enhancement of character.  Nature, of course, is a pruning pattern.  Improving the aesthetic eye of the garden creator is through pattern recognition.  Seek natural fractal patterns unique to each plant species.  Cloud Pruning, however, is intended to represent the amorphous ephemeral shapes of cloud pattern formations.

In the Japanese Garden there are three basic elements used: Stone, Water and Plants. The Art of Garden is in the details, without ignoring multiple arrangements and layering of Scalene Triangles.  But the concept of Ma or the void that defines the space between elements which infuses the garden with asymmetric balance, an optical tension or resonance, that is everywhere in Nature.  Always remember that Nature is the language of garden intimately connected with Japanese garden aesthetics.

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Pocket Japanese Garden Guide

The guide book was well received at the NAJGA 2014 Conference. Sold out most of my stock to Gift Shop managers attending the conference.  By placing the pocket guides at Botanic Garden Gift Shop as a concise visual primer for garden visitors, introducing them to the Japanese Garden Aesthetic .I'm impressed with the positive responses with agreement that the visual guide fulfills a need.  Seems to me that this is a case where something visual (picture) trumps excessive verbiage (a thousand words)?

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Self-published Guide Book

October 16—19, 2014  A Conference of the North American Japanese Garden Association, hosted by the Chicago Botanic Garden, Glencoe, IL.

The conference will have  a "shameless commerce division" Book Sales and Author Signing of publications created by attendees. I will be taking Purchase Orders from Garden Gift Shop Managers attending the conference. 

Who can say where this will go?  I hope to break even with this adventure in self-publishing.