Japanese Gardens Revealed and Explained


Book Description

Japanese Gardens - Revealed and Explained is comprehensive and thorough in its coverage of the subject of Japanese gardens and provides the reader with a journey through their history, meaning and eye catching beauty. All aspects of Japanese gardens and gardening are covered from design to ingredients and it even covers subjects like pruning techniques as well as numerous suggestions of what to plant in a Japanese garden courtesy of Master gardener L.H. Bailey. Discover Zen gardens (sometimes known as Japanese Rock gardens) and the deliberate ease of their appearance on the eye,meaning and design.This book is suitable for beginners right the way through to more experienced enthusiasts of Japanese gardens. Lovingly put together by the author and editor Russ Chard - a Japanese garden enthusiast and writer for over 10 years.Weblinks are included to Youtube videos to see how the author built a small space Japanese Zen garden at his home. This book is not plumped up with photographs, just 70 pages of pure Japanese garden information. The subject is complicated but Japanese gardens - Revealed and Explained is in plain English and simplified and explained for ease of learning. Anyone with ambitions to create and build a Japanese garden or Zen garden would find this book a very useful companion to their dream and plans through to the finished garden.




The Japanese Garden


Book Description

An in-depth exploration spanning 800 years of the art, essence, and enduring impact of the Japanese garden. The most comprehensive exploration of the art of the Japanese garden published to date, this book covers more than eight centuries of the history of this important genre. Author and garden designer Sophie Walker brings fresh insight to this subject, exploring the Japanese garden in detail through a series of essays and with 100 featured gardens, ranging from ancient Shinto shrines to imperial gardens and contemporary Zen designs. Leading artists, architects, and other cultural practitioners offer personal perspectives in newly commissioned essays.




Japanese Stone Gardens


Book Description

Gain some new ideas along with the principles and history of Japanese stone gardening with this useful and beautiful garden design book. Japanese Stone Gardens provides a comprehensive introduction to the powerful mystique and dynamism of the Japanese stone garden—from their earliest use as props in animistic rituals, to their appropriation by Zen monks and priests to create settings conducive to contemplation and finally to their contemporary uses and meaning. With insightful text and abundant imagery, this book reveals the hidden order of stone gardens and in the process heightens the enthusiast's appreciation of them. The Japanese stone garden is an art form recognized around the globe. These meditative gardens provide tranquil settings, where visitors can shed the burdens and stresses of modern existence, satisfy an age-old yearning for solitude and repose, and experience the restorative power of art and nature. For this reason, the value of the Japanese stone garden today is arguably even greater than when many of them were created. Fifteen gardens are featured in this book: some well known, such as the famous temple gardens of Kyoto, others less so, among them gardens spread through the south of Honshu Island and the southern islands of Shikoku and Kyushu and in faraway Okinawa.




The Samurai's Garden


Book Description

The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Gail Tsukiyama's The Samurai's Garden uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for this extraordinary story. A 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight. Matsu is a samurai of the soul, a man devoted to doing good and finding beauty in a cruel and arbitrary world, and Stephen is a noble student, learning to appreciate Matsu's generous and nurturing way of life and to love Matsu's soulmate, gentle Sachi, a woman afflicted with leprosy.




Styles and Motifs of Japanese Gardens


Book Description

Styles and Motifs Japanese Gardens is a highly accessible flip reference for the novice gardener and first time visitor. Each of the 31 beautiful Kyoto gardens featured in this book embody the unique landscaping approaches and techniques of the periods when they were created, from the Heian and Muromanchi eras to Momoyama. Features only gardens that are open to the public, making this book an ideal guide for visitors to Kyoto who wish to know more about the spirit and form of Japanese landscape arts.




Kyoto Gardens


Book Description

"Bring the art and beauty of Japan to your garden with inspiration from Kyoto Gardens." —HGTV Gardens Featuring beautiful Japanese garden photography and insightful writing, Kyoto Gardens is a labor of love from master photographer Ben Simmons and Kyoto-based writer Judith Clancy. In their rocks and plants, empty spaces and intimate details—Kyoto's gardens manifest a unique ability to provoke thought and delight in equal measure. These varied landscapes meld the sensuality of nature with the disciplines of cosmology, poetry and meditation. Japanese aristocrats created these gardens to display not just wealth and power, but cultural sensitivity and an appreciation for transcendent beauty. A class of professional gardeners eventually emerged, transforming Japanese landscape design into a formalized art. Today, Kyoto's gardens display an enormous range of forms—from rock gardens display of extreme minimalism and subtle hues, to stroll gardens of luscious proportions and vibrant colors. In Kyoto Gardens Simmons' photographs present a fresh and contemporary look at Kyoto's most important gardens. Their beauty is enhanced and humanized by gardeners tending the grounds using the tools of their art. Clancy's graceful text provides historical, aesthetic and cultural context to the Japanese gardens. Combining wonder and rigor, she describes how Kyoto's most beloved gardens remain faithful to their founders' creative spirit and conception. Journey to Kyoto's thirty gardens with just a turn of a page, or use the handy maps to plan your trip.




The Garden of Evening Mists


Book Description

This “elegant and haunting novel of war, art and memory" (The Independent) award-winning novel from the acclaimed author of The Gift of Rain follows the only Malaysian survivor of a Japanese wartime camp as she begins working for an exiled former gardener of the Emporer. Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the emperor of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice "until the monsoon comes." Then she can design a garden for herself. As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to the gardener and his art, while all around them a communist guerilla war rages. But the Garden of Evening Mists remains a place of mystery. Who is Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war perhaps the darkest secret of all?







Spaces in Translation


Book Description

In Spaces in Translation, Christian Tagsold explores Japanese gardens in the West and ponders their history, the reasons for their popularity, and their connections to geopolitical events. He concludes that a process of cultural translation between Japanese and Western experts created an idea of the Orient and its distinction from the West.




Garden History: A Very Short Introduction


Book Description

Gardens take many forms, and have a variety of functions. They can serve as spaces of peace and tranquilty, a way to cultivate wildlife, or as places to develop agricultural resources. Globally, gardens have inspired, comforted, and sustained people from all walks of life, and since the Garden of Eden many iconic gardens have inspired great artists, poets, musicians, and writers. In this Very Short Introduction, Gordon Campbell embraces gardens in all their splendour, from parks, and fruit and vegetable gardens to ornamental gardens, and takes the reader on a globe-trotting historical journey through iconic and cultural signposts of gardens from different regions and traditions. Ranging from the gardens of ancient Persia to modern day allotments, he concludes by looking to the future of the garden in the age of global warming, and the adaptive spirit of human innovation. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.