Ideas from Japan

     I returned yesterday from Japan, where I spent eight days visiting a hard-to-believe 33 gardens in Kyoto, almost all in Buddhist temples.  I need a vacation!!  In April 2014 I visited 26 gardens in Kyoto, and this time I paid repeat visits to only six.  Thus, after visiting 50 gardens I think I have some ideas how to improve my small (5,000-square-foot) Japanese-style garden. 

     One idea I picked up late this summer after reading an article by Tamao Goda in Sukiya Living, The Journal of Japanese Gardening.  Goda, a native of Japan, criticized the use of odd-numbered rock grouping common in North American Japanese-style gardens as looking too artificial and prominent.  It was exactly what I installed in my garden years ago, so I looked at it carefully.  I decided she was right, so more work to do.  I had three groups of five rocks each, all black volcanic stones from California, commonly called feather rock, as they are so light.  They were located between boxwoods in a bed of raked gravel, commonly seen in Zen gardens to represent the sea.  I was happy that in recent years moss appeared on several of the rocks, adding to the ancient look so desirable in Japanese gardens.  It so happened that just 15 feet away from them there was an area that I planned to build some sort of garden between a bench and a mound of moss already in place.  That turned out to be the perfect place to move the 15 rocks.  I used to have several hostas in that area, so they were removed.  Moss will be the primary plant in the area around the rocks, with a few small ferns added next spring.  Hostas are rarely used in gardens in Japan.  In over 50 gardens, I found only four using hostas.  I once read the Japanese consider them to be weeds.

     The first two photos show the garden last year, before I replaced the last Japanese juniper with a boxwood.  The third photo shows the load of rocks I bought at a quarry in Marathon County in central Wisconsin.  The rock is called an amphibolite, a metamorphic rock whose origin was either a mudstone composed of volcanic ash fall or a basalt.  I have that same rock in other areas of my Japanese-style garden, so I like the repetition created by replacing the volcanic rocks with the amphilobytes.  Instead of using a small number of separated rocks as before, I randomly piled fifteen or so to make it look more natural.