BOOKreviews
Inside Your Japanese Garden: A Guide to Creating a Unique Japanese Garden for Your Home Authors: Sadao Yasumoro and Joseph Cali Publisher: Tuttle Publishing List Price: $24.99 Order Link: https://amzn.to/3o6nF3h and https://bookshop.org/ a/79479/9784805316146 Reviewer: Jamie Oberg Inside Your Japanese Garden is a collaboration between Sadao Yasumoro and Joseph Cali. Cali, a writer and designer who graduated from Rhode Island School of Design and has been an interior and graphic designer in Japan for more than 30 years, records Yasumoro’s over 60 years of experience in designing and building Japanese gardens. Hironori Tomino rounds out the team with stunning photography alongside illustrated garden diagrams by Yasumoro. The introduction to this guide is a brief biography of Yasumoro that allows the reader to see gardening through his eyes. This impressive outline of his credentials leads into an explanation of how to get started with garden design for the layperson, with Yasumoro asserting “that you should develop your own approach to the Japanese garden, not rely too much on the ideas in a book.” I found this to be an interesting and honest approach for a guide book, immediately intriguing me. This section also lists explanations of Japanese design elements such as 18
WASHINGTON GARDENER
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meisho (a reference to literature or a real place), a preference for odd numbers and asymmetry, spirit vs. technique (“Spirit comes first. Technique will follow.”), miekakure (hide and reveal), and mitate (double meanings). Although it is essentially a glossary, this section filled me with awe at how deeply Japanese gardens are thought out. The book goes through 20 different gardens in Japan created by Yasumoro. Included are the garden of a NASA astrophysicist, a garden made with the help of birds, a garden in the middle of an urban jungle, and a Buddhist mountain retreat. The gardens are organized by themes separated by chapter and each is accompanied by breathtaking photographs. The first of these chapters is focused on entrances and automobiles. In Japan, garages are uncommon, so cars are usually left visible in front of one’s home. “In other words, the car becomes part of the architecture,” Cali and Yasumoro write before explaining how to design a house entrance where cars and nature can live alongside each other. It is a great introduction to how culture and design can intermingle. Chapter Two moves from the front of the house to the back, discussing how the purpose of a backyard affects its design. The most extreme example of this is a garden made from a landslide. Since the main purpose was preventing the land from sliding further, the design incorporated large piles of stones, concrete curbs, terracing, and a place for water runoff. The real-life application of this landslide garden is incredibly impressive, with Yasumoro noting that several other designers passed over the project because of its danger and difficulty. This chapter also includes multiple temple gardens as examples. Chapter Three scales things down to look at smaller gardens. The small side of things focuses on tsubos and tea gardens. Tsubos refer to miniature gardens, as well as small courtyards within a particular structure of Japanese houses. In both meanings, there is a connotation of intimacy. Teahouses and tea gardens are a large part of Japanese culture that have deep historical roots, but Yasumoro provides his
own interpretations. Especially when compared to the larger gardens in this book, which go up to 9,500 square feet, the smaller gardens featured that are as little as 26 square feet sound miniscule. Still, Yasumoro is able to inject a remarkable amount of nuance into each that inspires those with even the littlest of gardening spaces. The last chapter is a guide to working with different materials. Along with vocabulary, it includes different projects that can be made with stone. The first few projects are different types of walls and walkways. From there, the chapter explores bridges, water basins, arrangements, gutters, and more. This chapter also goes into working with mud and bamboo. Mud is primarily used for walls and floors, while bamboo is for fences. The guide explains how to mix different materials with clay for different projects. It also outlines the process of working with bamboo, from cleaning to cutting to “tying, nailing, and screwing.” It is a more practical chapter, but no less important or thought-provoking than the others. This book also includes detailed instructions for varying projects, from smaller builds such as an earthen bridge to more intimidating works such as the amigasa mon (a type of garden gate often associated with a teahouse). While much of the guide is geared more toward inspiration than strict directions, these sections provide concrete projects for the reader. Inside Your Japanese Garden is a unique garden design guide. It teaches about an entire culture, with a snapshot into its history and customs, through gardening. It feels as inspirational as, yet more educational than, the average garden design book because of this deeper breadth of information. The gardens throughout are beautiful and the Japanese garden conventions explained allow readers to think about design in an entirely different way. If you have any interest in Japanese aesthetics and culture, or just want a new way to view your garden, Inside Your Japanese Garden is sure to fill you with inspiration through detailed explanations, extensive garden design experiences, and belief that “[a] good
