All about Japanese-style gardens

By shauna dobbie

An example of the Karasansui, a dry stone garden.

Two 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 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 striated 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

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Here’s a guide to how to rake a Zen garden.

https://www.wikihow.com/Rake-a-Zen-Garden

Japanese Garden Devonian Botanic Garden in Edmonton.

Stone lantern. Butchart Gardens bridge.

development rather than a pain. See the QR video; it’s long, but soothing. The garden will need to be re-raked frequently, depending on the weather, the leaf-dropping trees around and the level of neatness you require.

These gardens are meant to be experienced from the sidelines. Perhaps a bench nearby is a good idea.

Roji, the tea garden

The tea garden is meant to be enjoyed as a transition from the outside world to the tea ceremony, inside the teahouse. It is meant to be designed with principles of rustic simplicity, to evoke a spot in the mountains.

There must be a water feature, intended for washing the hands and rinsing the mouth. This can take the form of a dish or it can be more elaborate, with flowing water. Think of a hollowed-out rock with water trickling into it through a bamboo pipe, the water spilling over the dish onto smooth rocks below.

There must be a path of steppingstones. And, if you’re building a tea garden, there should be some kind of teahouse, though it could be your house or a gazebo. You could build a Japanese-style tea garden, but a path leading to nowhere is anti-climactic.

Trees and plants in this garden are essential and they need to have a natural look; this is not the place for a knot garden. Choose trees and shrubs to close out the world beyond your garden. Closer in, use lots of shady green plants and blooming flowers only occasionally. When a flower blooms, it will take centre stage and shouldn’t have other flowers to compete with.

You can enclose the tea garden with a fence, perhaps a simple structure made of twigs or bamboo. A small simple but beautiful gate would look good, too. And this is the perfect spot for moss if you’re thinking of growing it. (See the moss story in this issue.)

Other things Japanese you might consider adding are a round bridge along the path and some stone lanterns. To give you a reason for the bridge, you’ll need either a stream or a dry riverbed of stones. j