All about Japanese-style gardens By Shauna Dobbie
An example of the Karasansui, a dry stone garden.
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wo kinds of garden from Japan are the karasansui, or stone garden, and the roji, or tea garden. There are more kinds of traditional garden in Japan, and the culture has a long history of honouring them. Canadians hoping to borrow from the customs of Japanese gardens risk fetishization, but not to worry; Japanese people tend to find it charming. Karasansui, the dry stone garden The dry stone garden has gravel and a few carefully placed rocks. Often, the gravel represents water and the larger, vertical boulders represent mountainous islands. There can be some studiously clipped shrubs or evergreens. Sometimes the garden is meant to evoke mountains reaching above the clouds. Sometimes it is meant to invoke nothing, to be simply a random-looking placement that is soothing. When the dry stone garden is built in Canada, it tends to be rectangular, but it doesn’t have to be. The gravel, which is often off-white, can be a different natural colour; there are 14 • 2020
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Here’s a guide to how to rake a Zen garden. https://www.wikihow.com/Rake-a-Zen-Garden
several beautiful examples in Japan of gravel in red or even black. If you’d like to construct such a garden, dig down about six inches and line the area with landscape fabric or you’ll be picking out weeds in a few months. Decide on the placement of your upright boulders and make depressions that will support them. The boulders should be placed before the gravel so that they’re in the display rather than on it. Spend some time to get the boulders exactly right. Moving them after the gravel is in will be a real pain. Choosing the boulders should be done with consideration. They should be the same kind of stone but vary in terms of shape and shading. For striIssue 4
ated rocks, make sure the striations go in the same direction on final placement. If you will have live material within the gravel, cut a hole in the landscape fabric and mound soil where the plants will be. Now go ahead and load in the gravel. Get it even and level around the boulders and any planting area. Then plant the planting area. To have Japanese flair, don’t overburden it with variety. Choose a ground cover that will mound over the border to the gravel, and a small shrub or tree. Good choices might be a Japanese maple or a corkscrew hazel. If you’re handy with topiary, plant a tree that can be shaped as a cloud tree, with bare branches and rounded tufts of leaves. The last step in installing your garden is to rake the gravel, paying special attention to the lines you leave. Typically, you will rake straight lines across, broken by lines circling around your islands. This will take great skill and practice. Consider it good for your localgardener.net
