Status Updates From Japan's Master Gardens: Les...

this book is so overdue at the library

this book is so overdue at the library

The motif of Mt. Meru, known to Japanese as Shumisen, is often seen in gardens as a single upright stone supported by a concentric arrangement of lesser rocks. Another stone might be named after Fudo-myoo, the deity that purges the world of sin and guards the gates of hell.

(cont from below) order present beneath the moldering stone and hoary bark.

Japanese gardening then is a collaboration between man& nature, moderated by the slow passage of time. Mature gardens contain the material outlines, the trapped sensations and essences of Older Japan. It's possible in the rock patterns, snarled trees, winding stone paths, lotus ponds, and in the sinuous lines raked in sand and gravel to discover principles consonant w/older beliefs&traditions, an almost hieratic...

...When the first gardens were eventually made, they were not created to oppose nature but to complement it.