Читать книгу Visionary Landscapes - Kendall H. Brown - Страница 9

TRADITIONS OF CHANGE:

JAPANESE-STYLE GARDENS TODAY

Gardens have flourished in Japan for fifteen centuries. Japanese gardens have been created around the world for only about 150 years, yet they are now more common outside Japan than in it. For non-Japanese, these gardens often exist as dreams of elsewhere and constructions of otherness. As microcosms of an idealized Japanese tradition, the landscapes can provide a compelling alternative to the banality of the here and now. Japanese gardens also serve as a kind of road home, a way of connecting with idealizations of nature that restore us mentally and physically. They are a cultural interpretation of nature refined into compelling and inspiring design forms transportable across time and space.

In the 21st century, Japanese gardens may well be considered a universal art. Like classical music, they are a set of forms and principles nurtured over time in a distinct place, then embraced and adapted so widely and deeply as to constitute an expressive language likely meaningful everywhere and available to anyone. Links with their birth culture, once strong, have become weaker as these garden styles accumulate identities and functions that may relate to Japan only tangentially. As such, it makes sense to call them Japanese-style gardens, acknowledging gardens based on adaptable values rather than gardens made in Japan or about Japan.

How and why have Japanese-style gardens grown into this remarkable, universal phenomenon? Beginning at world fairs in the 1870s in Europe and North America, Japanese entrepreneurs and officials built gardens as captivating settings for Japanese cultural and trade displays. At the same time, Euro-American tourists to Japan were filling their itineraries to the “flowery kingdom” with visits to gardens at temples, villas, restaurants and curio shops. Soon gardens became a kind of export commodity. Returning home, well-healed globetrotters commissioned their own Japanese garden. Aided by Japanese immigrants eager for work and abetted by Josiah Conder’s popular primer, Landscape Gardening in Japan (1893), gardens graced grand country homes and middle-class yards. Entrepreneurs fashioned commercial tea gardens where people gathered for leisure. City fathers, anxious to promote civic culture and beauty, adorned their parks with Japanese gardens.

In the Cold War era after World War II, the desire to re-establish bonds with Japan instigated a fresh era of Western interest in Japanese culture. This led to the refashioning of Japanese gardens as symbols of sophisticated beauty and international cooperation. Whether naturalistic gardens that abjured the trappings of pre-war exoticism, or “dry landscape” stone gardens that spoke the new universal language of abstraction, Japanese-style gardens again enhanced homes and businesses. They also became the focus of public friendship gardens. Recognized as places rich with symbolism and life force, Japanese-style gardens were created at facilities—from schools and hospitals to prisons—linked with growth, rehabilitation and endurance. During the war, Japanese Americans incarcerated in Relocation Camps built high-quality gardens to bind the wounds of dislocation, isolation and group living while stressing the vibrant adaptability of Japanese culture.

New York Times World’s Fair Section, 1939. Courtesy of Nancy e. Green.

David Slawson’s naturalistic Garden of Quiet Listening, created in 1976 at Carleton College, Northfield, MN, seeks to evoke a native place rather than a fantasy of Japan. It thrives under the thoughtful guidance of John Powell and a team of local gardeners.

An example of pre-World War II exoticism, the Japanese Garden built in 1928 at Swinney Park, Fort Wayne, IN, featured a miniature Mt Fuji, waterfalls, a pond, a teahouse, Japanese iris and 25 kinds of peony. Photo courtesy of Kendall Brown.

Recreated and reimagined with impressive devotion, the phenomenon of the Japanese-style garden may appear as a kind of chronic modern madness. Given the expense of building and maintaining gardens that are living, and thus fugitive, art forms, and the audacity of transplanting the product of one culture in foreign soils, this devotion seems a kind of folly. Indeed, most Japanese-style gardens created before World War II, and many after it, were abandoned in time. Yet, new gardens have been built without cessation, often reusing the “bones”—the stones, lanterns and plants—of defunct ones. The allure of gardens has outlived Japan crazes in crafts and waves of Japonisme in the arts. If history is a guide, gardens will abide when the fascination with anime (animation) and manga (comics) is long past.

The reasons for this Japanese garden madness are in part social and historical. With Japanese gardens signaling sophistication, the desire for status surely motivates their acquisition. Creating a Japanese garden also expresses a human desire to appropriate foreign things in a cultural masquerade that satisfies our inquisitiveness while cloaking the mundane facts of life. For North Americans and post-war Europeans, Japanese culture, manifested most holistically and immersively in gardens, offers a beguiling alternative to the old European order and opens up an unfamiliar perspective that presents the world afresh.

Japanese-style gardens also connect with specific historical contexts, for instance, with the American immigration themes of assimilation and alienation. For Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, emboldened and burdened by manifest destiny, Japanese gardens proffered fantasy landscapes that both enhanced and questioned the great projects of subduing the land and its peoples, and then moving upward in cities premised on endless progress. Created across the vast continent, Japanese gardens fit into the pioneer narratives of taming nature by making it bountiful and beautiful and imprinting it with foreign cultures. Alternately, American Japanese gardens complicate the discourse of European civilization, which is resolutely practical and masculine, extending inexorably and inevitably westward.

More broadly, in the modern age of disenchantment, Japanese-style gardens offer re-enchantment. In an epoch of ideological fissures manifest in world wars, then international terrorism, and marked physically by dramatic, even cataclysmic technological development, Japanese-style gardens sustain belief in the redemptive power of nature and the reinventive potential of culture. With deep roots in nature and culture, gardens can nurture as well as liberate.

The social history of Japanese-style gardens opens itself to multiple critiques. As Western constructs of Japan, gardens form a rich chapter for the study of Orientalism. As projections of Japan’s imagined uniqueness, they exemplify Japan’s strategic self-Orientalizing. Japanese-style gardens also demonstrate the commodification of culture by the relentless culture industry. Gardens at world fairs and sister-city projects show how art and history are deployed for political agendas.

Historical analyses clarify some basic motivations for and implications of Japanese-style gardens. Social factors also help explain why so many Westerners and some Japanese have been content with garish pastiches. However, the circumstances around gardens do not account for the deeper resonances of human experience in them. Historical investigation does not address the affective power that has made Japanese-style gardens so compelling to so many people in so many places for so many years. Although improbable luxuries in many ways, Japanese-style gardens can serve functions critical for our lives. Surely gardens are necessary follies.

People invest deeply in Japanese-style gardens because, when well designed and thoughtfully fostered, they have a rare capacity to move us, to hold us in awe, to take us on a journey. Increasingly, the journey is not to Japan. Now, Japanese-style gardens function less as microcosms of Japan, repudiating the old world fair’s function of imagined travel. Rather, they perform more effectively as Japanese-inspired microcosms of nature. The overtly Japanese features—moon bridges, cherry trees, lanterns—signal a cultural affiliation conveyed more profoundly in the ideas informing the arrangement and care of the plants, rocks and waterways. When present in moderation, signs of Japan, of foreignness, help us believe more deeply in a garden as an alternative order, a world complete in itself. This sense of leave-taking is symbolized and internalized by passage through the gate that often begins the physical garden journey. Letting go of the old, leaving the mundane, we enter new realities open to new possibilities. Losing ourselves we find ourselves.

At the Denver Botanic Gardens’ Garden of Pine Winds, the main gate was enlarged and relocated in 2012 as Sadafumi Uchiyama’s master plan enhanced visitor flow. A signature ponderosa pine was also transplanted.

New Japanese Garden Journeys

For Japanese-style gardens around the world, the 21st century signals a new era. The histories of gardens in Japan and Japanese-style gardens abroad are established, their links and differences clarified, so that huckster language proclaiming an authentic Japanese garden should induce a regretful cringe rather than wide-eyed admiration. Untethered from simply representing Japan by proxy, Japanese-style gardens are blooming in diverse ways. Models of hybridity, synthesis, adaptability and even sustainability, they are dynamic translations, not transplanted copies. Japanese-style gardens shift our perception of the originals and allow us to root ourselves more deeply in the world. Institutions and organizations in Japan, America and Europe debate and plan the evolving identities of gardens as an immersive living art. Gardens are places that we actively nurture. They are environments that nurture us individually and collectively. They are resonant sites for physical and mental healing, for repose and self-cultivation, for individual and social transformation.

In the books Japanese-style Gardens of the Pacific West Coast and Quiet Beauty: The Japanese Gardens of North America, my goal was to move from the appealing mystery of Japanese gardens to the accounts of the people who commissioned and created Japanese-style gardens. The first study, written with an air of academic melancholy, sought to shift the discourse from soft rhetoric about essences and authenticity to the hard ground of social, political and cultural circumstance. The second survey suggested how public gardens reflect aspects of North American cultural relations with Japan over the past 120 years.

This book extends that trajectory to connect Japanese-style gardens with the minds and hearts of the people who create and utilize them now. For the author, this book rejects the historian’s ostensibly objective presentation of the past to advocate for Japanese-style gardens as transformative spaces now and in the future. It examines gardens built in the past two decades to reveal some of the most recent ideas about their design and function. It expands the scope from public gardens to gardens at homes and businesses to indicate how gardens impact us where we live and work. Because the pleasure and power of Japanese-style gardens bridge the intentions of their creators with the efforts and experiences of their users, I include mini-essays by garden builders on the gardens in Japan that inspired them and essays by patrons and users on the impact of gardens in their lives.

As with any art, Japanese-style gardens are diverse in form and fluid in meaning. They are shaped by such external factors as politics and economics as well as field-specific agents like persuasive teachers and influential books. First, though, gardens are the product of the designers and builders who set their direction. The initial step in understanding contemporary Japanese-style gardens is to meet their makers.

This book examines the gardens of Hōichi Kurisu, Takeo Uesugi, David Slawson, Shin Abe and Marc Peter Keane. Based on the impact, quality and number of their gardens and publications over the past four decades, these five men have been among the leading designer-builders in North America—the region with the best-developed tradition of Japanese-style gardens. Subsequent chapters analyze the recent public, commercial and residential gardens of these five figures in light of their life stories and their design ideologies. These chapters are not authorized but are interpretations derived from their work, writing and interviews.

To stress the dynamism of Japanese-style gardens, most of the gardens here are newly made. As such, they have yet to accrue the patina of naturalness that comes with age. These young gardens suggest not only the edge of an evolving art form but signal the need for dutiful care and thoughtful use. Thus, this essay introduces some of the critical ways in which gardens grow physically and functionally. First, however, it sketches the diverse lineages of Japanese-style garden makers in North America to establish a context—the ground from which the five featured figures emerge.

Fujitarō Kubota’s woodland stream-and-pond garden, created in 1961 at Bloedel Reserve, Bainbridge Island, WA, evokes both Japan and the Pacific Northwest.

The Topography of Garden Designers in North America

Most gardens built from 1885 through World War II were by men whose names and lives are obscure. Even when we know the biographies of first-generation immigrants (issei)—Tarō Ōtsuka (1869–?) in Chicago and Kinzuchi Fujii (1875–1957) in Southern California—their attitudes remain opaque. In a few cases, documents reveal more. New York’s famous Takeo Shiota (1881–1943) wrote that Japanese gardens are idealized landscapes holding spiritual connotations. By contrast, Shōgo Myaida (1897–1989), active from Florida to New York, and Seattle’s Fujitarō Kubota (1879–1973) fashioned “American Japanese gardens” that deployed native plants, reflected local landscapes and embraced evolving functions.¹

After World War II, a new generation of Japanese immigrants crossed the Pacific to make a living and a reputation by making gardens. Repeating the pre-war pattern, a few, like Nagao Sakurai (1896–1973) in San Francisco and Eijirō Nunokawa (1905–87) in Los Angeles, were university-trained garden builders. Others, like Kōichi Kawana (1930–90), took up garden making as part of an identity crafted in America. They worked beside and in competition with second-generation Japanese Americans (nisei). Many, like Henry Matsutani (1921–97) in San Francisco’s East Bay, forged careers designing, building and maintaining Japanesque landscapes around Japan-inspired post-war ranch homes. Kaneji Dōmoto (1913–2002), heir to Oakland’s Dōmoto Brothers Nursery, represents another nisei trajectory. Dōmoto studied physics at Stanford, then architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, but unable to find work in those professions due to his heritage, he pursued a landscape career, making Japanese-style gardens in the suburbs of New York City and beyond.²

Even as Japanese American landscapers were adapting Japanese garden styles to fit the largely residential and commercial environments where they worked, in Japan garden builders were evolving new Japanese garden styles. Most notable was Jūki Iida (1889–1977), whose devotion to natural-style gardens is captured in Seattle’s Washington Park Japanese Garden. His disciple, Kenzō Ogata (1912–88), known outside Japan for his gardens at the University of Hawai’i and Brisbane Botanic Garden, fused the naturalistic garden with the concept of kisei (spirit force). Ogata taught that gardens could soothe the mind and body through emphasis on implicit and often indirect natural force that informs every part of the garden, from its composition and sound to the pruning of a single tree.

Kōichi Kawana’s dramatic, romantic and symbolic Garden of the Three Islands at the Chicago Botanic Garden features views of the unreachable Island of eternal Happiness.

Kawana directs construction of the Garden of the Three Islands in 1980. Photo courtesy of Kris Jarantoski.

To create a quiet garden retreat for a residence on Whidbey Island, WA, Sadafumi Uchiyama included a grove of bamboo and andromeda that opens to reveal a pond filled with water hyacinth and edged with Japanese kerria, sweet flag and Siberian iris.

Ogata’s ideas inspired and infused a generation of garden makers in Japan, and several who came to North America through the curator-in-residence program at the Portland Japanese Garden, initiated in 1968 by Takuma Tono (1891–1987). Chief among these pupils is Hōichi Kurisu, Portland’s second curator, whose firm later employed several Ogata disciples. A product of that experience is Tōru Tanaka who, with five cohorts in the Ogata-kai, a group dedicated to continuing Ogata’s legacy, created a public garden dedicated to him in Albuquerque. The naturalistic Ogata-based style refined in the Pacific Northwest is evident in the Cascadesthemed Japanese garden at Central Washington University by Masayuki Mizuno, another former Portland curator.

From 1960 to 1990, an era of Japanese and American economic ascendance, Japanese masters created important public and private gardens across North America. Katsuo Saitō (1893–1987), Kannosuke Mori (1894–1960), Ken Nakajima (1914–2000), Tansai (Taichiro) Sano (1897–1966), Kinsaku Nakane (1917– 95), Yoshikuni Araki (1921–97), Tadashi Kubo (1922– 90) and Makoto Nakamura made gardens that express each man’s distinctive sensibility adapted to a new environment. Their impact is seen further in the work of Japanese pupils who emigrated to America, like Takeo Uesugi (Kubo, Nakamura) and Shin Abe (Nakane), and American students who trained briefly in Japan, including David Engel (Sano), Ron Herman (Kubo), Julie Messervy (Nakane) and David Slawson (Nakane). The next generation of Japanese garden builders currently active in North America includes Shirō Nakane, Shunmyō Masuno and Takuhiro Yamada, among an expanding list.³

The Japanization of the North American landscape is also the result of regional and often remarkable Japanophile landscapers and landscape architects. For instance, Samuel Newsom (1899–1996), scion of a Bay Area nurseryman and architect, was so entranced by Japanese gardens that he studied in Japan from 1934 to 1939, wrote books based on the experience and created gardens around San Francisco. In contrast, landscape architect Ethelbert Furlong (1894–1993) never visited Japan but leveraged Japanese design to create modernist Japanese-style gardens from Manhattan to Maryland between 1935 and 1965. His minimalist Garden of One Hundred Stones, in consultation with Thomas Church, at a house in Orange, New Jersey, won ASLA and Pace Setter awards in 1949! The post-war re-embrace of Japan as part of Cold War Orientalism gave rise to a generation whose exposure to Japan came during military service. Figures like John W. Catlin (1919–2008) in Los Angeles and Jack C. Miller (1924–2013), Philadelphia’s “Moss Man,” created gardens redolent of their interests and period styles. Current garden makers like Stephen Morrell and Chadine Gong near New York and San Francisco, respectively, demonstrate Japan’s continued refraction in vernacular landscape.⁴

Other garden builders resist easy categorization. Although born to a family of nurserymen-landscapers, Sadafumi Uchiyama studied at the University of Illinois, served in Japan’s diplomatic corps then, inspired by regional environmental design, returned to Illinois for a Masters in Landscape Architecture, writing on Japanese garden history. After work in Kurisu’s firm, Uchiyama set up his own business, then became curator at Portland Japanese Garden. His early gardens assert themselves with diplomatic restraint. At the Denver Botanic Garden, Uchiyama sensitively revised the flow in Kōichi Kawana’s original pond-style stroll garden and added new gates as well as a tea garden. At the Sarah P. Duke Gardens, he realized curator Paul Jones’ vision of a hillside waterfall-and-stream garden redolent of an abandoned warrior’s villa. For a garden between the home and studio of a potter, Uchiyama’s woodland stream creates a centered focus for the artisan at her wheel, a place to wander at leisure, and also captures distant views of Puget Sound and the Cascades.

Making Gardens Meaningful

The preceding paragraphs, which discussed gardens as solo productions, create the misleading impression that gardens, like paintings or sculptures, are made by heroic creators. In fact, most gardens are collaborative, and gardens of sufficient history are revised by the hands of time and by the hands of multiple makers and caregivers. Although writing about Buddhist practice, the famous priest and garden enthusiast Musō Soseki (1275–1351) wrote, “He who distinguishes between the garden and practice cannot be said to have found the way.”⁵

For homeowners, whose garden connections are personal, there is no escaping the reality of gardens as process rather than product. The intimate, nuanced pleasures of evolving a garden are clearly seen in the hillside home of Stu and Jane Bowyer in Orinda, California, and in their writing about it (see next page). Implicit in their experience is a willingness to change unsuccessful features. Living with the garden, they embrace its transformation through partnerships with diverse specialists.⁶

If working closely with talented garden builders and pruners is gratifying, then making a garden oneself is potentially even more rewarding. For this reason, and because people mistakenly think that gardens are easy to construct and maintain, there is a plethora of how-to books.⁷ However, the numerous poor and abandoned self-made gardens suggests that Japanese-style gardens are best left to professionals intimately involved with the client. The rare exceptions reveal the great diligence required to create successful gardens as well as their profound benefits.

The hillside waterfall that flows from the street to the front of the Bowyer home in Orinda, CA, exemplifies how well-designed and maintained gardens provide places of dynamic tranquility for homeowners.

In 2000, artist Adel M. and her architect husband bought an historic house by modernist architect Harwell Harris. Built in 1942 on a hillside near downtown Los Angeles, the house was inspired by Japanese design in its open-floor plan, modular wooden construction and indoor–outdoor integration. After sensitively expanding the house to create several courtyards, they hired a landscape architect to redesign the backyard slope. Dissatisfied with a result inappropriate to both architecture and environment, they removed the garden and decided to create themselves a series of Japanese-style gardens based on their intimate knowledge of their site, vast reading, travel to Japan and design experience. Working with a staff of three gardeners, over a decade the self-taught couple have fashioned courtyard gardens, bamboo groves, a pond garden buffered by high, undulating hedges inspired by Kyoto’s Shugakuin Villa, and a series of garden paths and rooms connecting the main house to a guest house below.

Creating Our Garden Home

In making a residential Japanese garden over forty years, our method is to find the best specialists and enlist their help. We have worked with four local masters: Mr Sato to make initial blueprints and create the dry lake; Henry Matsutani to design and build a waterfall; Dennis Makishima to shape trees and plantings; and Bill Castellan to place rocks. We read extensively about traditional gardens. When traveling to Japan as university professors, we always visit at least one major garden and stay in Japanese ryokan inns with gardens. After each visit, we incorporate new ideas.

Our obsession with creating and maintaining this piece of art is based on the indoor–outdoor flow of our relatively small hillside home. With two exceptions, each room opens to the garden. Minimalist décor allows our screened windows to frame the garden. Creative, beautiful and peaceful, the garden is a seamless part of being home. The garden wakes us and peacefully ends our day.

Our design principles are those of good art. Fascinated by how illusion transforms space and time, we borrow scenery from the distant hills to expand our space. The waterfall masks the view and sound of a public road a few feet away. We feel joy when we walk past the shaped black pines, under the torii gate, through the gradual unfolding of smaller gardens. It is a journey of discovery to walk to and from our home. The view is never the same.

We provide garden maintenance as we can, aided by people who love the garden. We are intimately involved in each decision and guided by the wisdom of the four masters. Our garden means life to us.

Jane and Stu Bowyer

Masterfully creating areas of intimacy and broad spaces that frame and capture distant views, the owner-designers carefully balance texture and color, mixing meticulously pruned plants (podocarpus juniper, miniature bay laurel and boxwoods) with a hardscape of gravel, stone, brick and slate. The hill garden is shaded by cork oak and California live oak as well as eucalyptus, with a mid-story of black pines, plum, toyon and agonis pruned in Japanese styles when possible. A perpetual work in progress, the garden is the proverbial labor of love, receiving significant investments of time, thought and money. Made—and remade—slowly, by multiple hands and under the direction of an artist and architect, the garden is a creative expression and immersive environment that comforts both body and mind.

The collaborative creativity of gardens may be broad. In the traditional model, a master works with a cohort of relatives and employees. In the contemporary case, professors of landscape architecture often utilize colleagues and students. Trade associations also produce gardens, with specialists often linking to complete a project in a distant place in a short time. For instance, in response to the 2011 disaster in Japan’s Tōhoku region, the Garden Society of Japan (Nihon teien kyōkai) created a garden to commemorate the disaster and recovery. Professionals from across Japan joined with garden students from Japan and abroad in a project where the spirit of human connection was as important as the resulting landscape.

Collective garden building thrives in Britain where members of the Japanese Garden Society (JGS), led by Graham Hardman and Robert Ketchell, began to build gardens in 2005. After making small courtyard gardens at public venues, from 2009 they have made gardens at hospices. In 2014, for example, eighteen JGS volunteers contributed 300 individual days to create a large garden at Bury Hospice. One volunteer, Ioan Davies, along with Hardman, wrote a haiku, later placed on a garden plaque, which encapsulates the project’s value for both users and makers: “From tarmac and turf/a landscape, islands and seas:/solace for the soul.”⁸

Collaborations can produce gardens and goodwill, but the joy of creation can overshadow the quotidian care required for a successful garden. Arguably, the commemorative function of many Japanese-style gardens celebrates completion but ignores maintenance. Moreover, emphasis on garden builders obscures the critical role of gardeners in a living art. To compound the problem, in Japan the hereditary system of garden makers-caretakers has eroded. In North America, first- and second-generation Japanese gardeners, men dedicated to a profession linked with cultural identity, have died off. Lacking adequate attention, gardens invariably decline.

To remedy this deterioration of gardens, gardening knowledge and systems of garden education, thoughtful gardeners are revising old paradigms of creation and maintenance and actively passing on what they know. Tomoki Katō, the eighth-generation head of Kyoto garden firm Ueyakatō and a PhD in garden history, has proposed the concept of fostering rather than maintaining. Fostering stresses the gardener’s dynamic role in raising a garden as one raises a child from birth to adulthood and old age. Katō proposes that a garden is 40 percent the product of its being built and 60 percent the product of fostering. For Katō, the craftsman is a student learning constantly from gardens, from tradition, which itself is innovative, and from the team through shared sensibility and collective experience. Because gardens outlive their creators and initial caretakers, Katō’s concept of fostering extends from nurturing gardens to cultivating generations of gardeners.⁹

The Garden of a Thousand Views at Bury Hospice in england is meant to be seen from inpatients’ rooms, provide seating and allow intrepid visitors to experience surprise views by crossing its paths. Photo courtesy of Graham Hardman.

In the linked garden rooms at the hillside M residence in Los Angeles, CA, the owners work with a team of three gardeners and volunteers to nurture a landscape that evokes Japanese principles while harmonizing with the local environment.

Miles Neilsen & the Rusted Hearts perform at the summer concert series at the Anderson Japanese Gardens, Rockford, IL. Photo by Nels Akerlund, courtesy of Anderson Japanese Gardens.

Planned garden progression in North America is exemplified by David Slawson and John Powell. Recognizing that he was unable to care for the gardens he created, Slawson contacted Powell, a garden maker, pruning specialist and nurseryman, who had trained at Suzuki Zōen in Niigata and at the garden at the Adachi Museum of Art in Shimane. To adapt Slawson’s gardens to shifting conditions, Powell had to grasp Slawson’s ideas as well as local conditions. Realizing the relative brevity of his career, Powell trained local gardeners to support and eventually take over each garden’s care. Likewise, public garden administrators, having paid large sums to create gardens, are now investing in the gardeners who evolve and foster the designer’s vision.

Making Gardens for People

The rewards of fostering gardens extend beyond improving a garden’s condition. Home gardeners have long known that gardens, while beautiful to look at, connect hands and heart. Garden pleasures include the tender exercise of pruning, the satisfaction of helping living things thrive and the sense of transcending oneself through intimacy with the earth. These basic benefits, along with the very real status accrued through gardens when used for social events, likely informed the creation of historic gardens in Japan, whether at the villas of aristocrats, the temple residences of monks or the estates of warriors. However, in the 20th century, when these places became tourist sites, open during business hours for viewing on a roped path or from a verandah, gardens were stripped of their core values. Like the modern museum model they emulate, gardens became historic sites for passive viewing. Gardens created for moon-viewing parties now close at dark, visitors must not touch—much less pluck—a sprig of flowers and reading a pamphlet’s potted history replaces poetry writing as the expected literary activity.

In the half-century after World War II, Japanese-style gardens largely followed the passive contemplation model authorized by Kyoto gardens entrenched within Japan’s tourist industry and cultural patrimony. The mode and mood of hushed reverence is often enhanced by a Japanese tea ceremony. It is broken only by the occasional Japanese festival that creates cultural cachet and weddings that bring cash. These joyous activities return human celebration, with music and drink, to gardens. They also extend visiting hours so that gardens soften in deepening shadows and are enriched by the scents of plants born on evening breezes.

In the great awakening now transforming public Japanese-style gardens, many are expanding their activities to open wide as places for diverse and dynamic engagement. Education, for instance, often extends beyond Japanese culture to art instruction for children and adults and special tours for the blind and those with special needs. Gardens now host art installations where art works intervene, often spectacularly, in the landscape. Some universities are planning gardens as part of mindfulness programs to liberate students from the mindlessness of cyber pop culture.

The myriad activities possible in gardens are exemplified by the Anderson Japanese Gardens in Rockford, Illinois. The once private garden has not only opened to the public but during a half-year season hosts an astounding array of social events: a summer festival, evening concerts, Friday night socials, a lecture series, tea ceremonies, children’s classes and explorer tours, creative arts’ workshops and health and wellness programs, including Early Onset Alzheimer walks, in addition to weddings and private parties. Most revealing of the Anderson’s social mission is a program bringing patients from Rosecrance, an adolescent substance abuse treatment center, to the garden. There, they work with gardeners to foster the garden, an environment rich in biophilia and cultural markers of harmonious connection. The garden’s size and complexity allow it to facilitate social communion and still stimulate solitary contemplation.

Arguably, this potential for direct engagement with nearby nature is what makes all gardens compelling. Because Japanese-style gardens function so persuasively as physical and philosophical microcosms, their pull is even stronger. The almost uncanny attraction of Japanese-style gardens is best revealed in the stories of the people who give their time and energy to work in them. The word “volunteer” conjures an image of a docent leading a group of students, the latter glad to be out of class and the former happy for an audience. Docent guides are important but volunteers accomplish more for gardens and for themselves. For example, they often do detailed but non-specialized tasks like weeding and deadheading blossoms that may seem tedious—like a form of punishment—for the paid worker but are therapeutic for the volunteer.

Most every volunteer program is full of talented people, working or retired, who “find themselves” in garden work. When Duke Gardens, next to a hospital, built a new Japanese garden, several retired medical staff volunteered. One, retired nurse Flora O’Brien, took on moss care as her specialty. Calmed by the focus of pulling leaves and pine needles from moss beds, after each session O’Brien composed a garden-based haiku. On September 17, 2015, she wrote: “In the quiet pool/ pine needles float/on the sky.”¹⁰ The poem, crystalizing one deep experience of nature, reveals the power of engagement with a garden to pull us fully into the moment, then transcend it.

In 2012, retired student advisor Martin McKellar began to volunteer in the new rooftop Japanese-style gardens at the University of Florida’s Harn Museum. Intrigued by the patterns raked in the gravel of the dry garden, McKellar visited Japan to learn techniques and styles. His ground-up fascination with raking resulted in accidental discovery of its contemplative aspect. Feeling that he had been raking with his ego, McKellar started making patterns to “appease kami, not visitors.” He next pursued raking as a therapeutic activity for patients in the university hospital, working with the university’s Arts in Medicine program inspired by the idea that “fine arts heal.”¹¹

The appeal of volunteering may also connect with identity, yet exceed it. In 2015, at age 78, Dawn Ishimaru Frazier began volunteering in the Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden. Created in Pasadena from 1935 to 1940, the large residential garden had been recently renovated and opened to the public. Raised in rural Reedley, California by a second-generation mother and an immigrant father who worked at local orchards, Frazier later lived in large houses in several cities. Widowed, relocated to an urban condo and finished volunteering at museums, she felt the need to touch, with gloveless hands, the living earth. Doing basic pruning and clean-up for four hours a week, Frazier enjoys the garden’s quietude, time with other like-minded people and seeing things grow in a place that recalls her rural childhood and her parents’ culture. “The critical thing,” she says, “is connecting to soil, to plants . . . to something with a bigger, longer history.”¹² The sway of gardens on volunteers speaks to kinds and depths of engagement beyond the familiar binaries of labor and leisure, creation and consumption, private and public. Indeed, the transcendence of such boundaries is part of the appeal of giving oneself to a garden that is not one’s own. Gardens make deep connections.

Martin McKellar rakes patterns in the dry rooftop garden at the Harn Museum, Gainesville, FL. There he leads a team of volunteers who care for the garden and creatively connect it with patients in a nearby hospital. Photo courtesy of Martin McKellar.

Gardens as Places of Wellness and Transformation

Writing the Foreword to David Engel’s Japanese Gardens For Today, modernist architect Richard Neutra calls Japanese gardens “humanized naturalism,” citing their ability to please “the humble, the modest, and the rich.” Neutra attributes this deep satisfaction to the “multi-sensorial appeal of the sounds, odors, and colors of nature, the thermal variations of shade, sunlight, and air movements” in Japanese gardens. He imagines “happy endocrine discharges and pleasant associations” in the body of the strolling visitor, and “vital, vibrating functions of subtle life processes” for the viewer in repose.¹³

Neutra’s assumption of positive physical responses to Japanese gardens is born out in studies by Eijirō Fujii and his students on the psycho-physiological effects of Japanese gardens. Using electroencephalograms and infrared spectroscopy to measure brain activity as well as eye movement analysis, Fujii charted reactions to tree arrangements and pruning styles, finding responses to Japanese garden forms more calming that those in symmetrical gardens. The research of his students Seiko Gotō and Minkai Sun shows that Japanese gardens have palliative and perhaps healing effects among patients with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia by, at the very least, reducing stress.¹⁴

The positive psycho-physiological response to Japanese gardens suggests that they constitute the kind of optimal environment innately preferred by humans because they facilitate physical and mental wellbeing. Rachel and Stephen Kaplan famously posited that humans prefer open yet spatially rich places that include water, diverse plants and discrete signs of human habitation. Structurally, such places feature moderate complexity, with visual coherence at a glance, legibility if one imagines action there, and mystery—the promise that one could learn more. This last quality is best realized in compositions where the foreground is seen but “part of the landscape known to be present is nevertheless concealed.”¹⁵

The Kaplans proposed that such landscapes induce involuntary attention that is restorative. Restorative environments are predicated on the sense of “being away,” inhabiting a place where one integrates with something different from the norm. This environment must be a “whole other world,” with a scope and connectedness as well as coherence that makes even small spaces seem large conceptually. Critical is fascination, the pleasurable stimulus to reflective engagement found in dramatic things like waterfalls but more often in the soft fascination of the play of light and shadow or the texture of leaves. Last is a sense of belonging based on accord between environmental patterns and the human actions required to navigate them. In sum, restorative spaces produce the satisfaction of union with something older and greater than oneself that William James described as “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”¹⁶