Winter is here.

     After an unusually warm fall, winter suddenly arrived recently.  The first snow arrived December 4th, seven inches fell on December 11th, and another six inches fell yesterday.

     The snow adds considerable interest to the gardens, it makes me feel a bit sorry for those who live in southern climes.  Photos are nice, but one has to be here to fully appreciate the beauty provided by the snow.  The last three photos of "sagging snow" were taken after the snow melted a bit.

     The photos were all taken in my Japanese-style garden.  More will follow in a week or two.  I still have three more postings of my photos from Japan, so I hope no one gets impatient for them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kyoto 3--Tofuku-ji and Komyo-in

     Tofuku-ji is one of my favorite temples in Japan, visiting it in 2014 and last month.  It has a deep ravine on its edge, making for beautiful landscapes, with a great deal of superb Japanese maples.  It has a raked-gravel artificial sea with mounded moss areas, rare in the 56 gardens I visited in Japan.  The moss on those areas is Polytrichum commune, the most common moss used in Japan.  It looked beautiful in November, but it was largely brown when I visited in April 2014, likely the effect of winter conditions.  I thought the checkerboard moss garden was a bit hokey.

     The last two photos were taken in nearby Komyo-in temple.  It was much smaller and better maintained, without the weeds, leaves, and debris of the heavily visited Tofuku-ji.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kyoto 2--Shoren-in and Eikan-do Temples

     Here is the second of a planned six postings of my tour of 33 gardens in Kyoto, Japan I took a few weeks ago.

     The first two photos are of Shoren-in temple.

     The last eight photos are of Eikan-do, one of the better gardens I visited.  The colors of the Japanese maples were incredible.  It was the only garden I visited of 56 (in 2014 and this year combined) that I saw an irrigation system for the mosses.  Some ladies, even young ones, still like to dress up in traditional kimonos, which added to the beauty of the gardens for me.

 

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

      

Kyoto gardens-1

     I recently returned from touring 33 gardens in Kyoto, Japan--almost all connected with Buddhist temples.  As I am a moss aficionado, I was most interested in how they use moss in Japan.  I identified most of them.  Most mosses I saw can be found in my state of Wisconsin, though the most common one, Polytrichum commune, is only rarely found in southern Wisconsin, where I live.

     As the Japanese have a reputation for order and a clean environment, I was surprised and disappointed to find that, in general, maintenance of the mosses was fair to poor.  Only four gardens had what I would call good maintenance--few or no weeds, bare spots, debris, etc.

     I will display my photos in several different posts, as there are so many.  So, it will take several weeks before I post them all.  And there will be a further delay, as I will be on a trip to Arizona all next week.

     Photo 1 is from Gio-ji, probably the best maintained garden I saw. 

     Photo 2-4 are from Saiho-ji, the most famous moss garden in Japan.  It is also called Kokedera, which means Moss Temple in English.  Koke is moss in Japanese.  It is huge, with four acres of moss in a rolling wooded area with a pond.  It cost about $30 to visit, and about 110 people tour at ten in the morning and another 110 in the afternoon.  So, with over $6000 in revenue a day, one would expect better maintenance that I saw. 

     Ryogen-in appears in Photo 5.

     Photo 6 shows Obai-in, my favorite moss garden in Japan.  I also visited it in April 2014, but now it even looks better as the Polytrichum mosses look greener, better than in spring when they brown up somewhat.

     Photos 7&8 are from Korin-in.  Photo 9 is from Koto-in.  Photo 10 is from Anraku-ji.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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.