Japanese Gardens, aka Nature Misbehaving

Yesterday I visited one of Japan's most beautiful gardens (one of the top three in the official rankings), Kenroku-en garden in Kanazawa. Formerly the private garden of a local shogun, it was indeed a lovely, lovely place. Japanese gardens are based largely on moss, water elements, rocks and gravel, trees and bushes. 

Flowers and especially flowering trees are also highly valued, but it's not about floral glory, but more about the gentle harmony of different hues and shapes of green (or now in Autumn, green, yellow and red). I approve!

And of course every good garden needs a tea-room for whittling away those lazy summer days.

One personal favourite was a temple garden in Kyoto, where my old friend mr Moss was at it again, forming a garden, in which you could literally see Alice playing chess in Wonderland with the Red Queen.

 

However, the design calls for a high degree of control and maintenance. You want that pine tree just so tall, and no taller, you want that stream clear and bubbling - and keeping it that way is a constant fight against nature. Since nature has a tendency to misbehave in oh, so many ways!

Nature Behaving Badly: Snow. You have to support trees branches from the weight of snow so that they don't bend or break. So every November you rig support-ropes to the trees, which you take down again come Spring.

Nature Behaving Badly: Leaves falling and needles turning brown. Well, really! The sheer gumption of it! This must be fought against not only by sweeping the moss clean of dead leaves, but also by sending gardeners up ladders to shake away those unseemly dead pine needles from the trees. I also saw two men in a maple-tree outside a shopping mall in central Hiroshima shaking down brown maple leaves (I kid you not!).

Nature Behaving Badly: Mud. And just when you think everything is under control, you discover a deposit of mud has formed at the bottom of your brook. Well, that can't be tolerated. Luckily it's nothing sending four men with brooms to brush the riverbed clean won't mend.

But once you have all this sorted, one must admit the end results are rather glorious.