31 Facts About Japanese garden

1.

Japanese literature on gardening goes back almost a thousand years, and several different styles of garden have developed, some with religious or philosophical implications.

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2.

The Japanese tradition has long been to keep a well-designed garden as near as possible to its original condition, and many famous gardens appear to have changed little over several centuries, apart from the inevitable turnover of plants, in a way that is extremely rare in the West.

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3.

Awareness of the Japanese style of gardening reached the West near the end of the 19th century, and was enthusiastically received as part of the fashion for Japonisme, and as Western gardening taste had by then turned away from rigid geometry to a more naturalistic style, of which the Japanese style was an attractive variant.

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4.

Between 600 and 612 CE, the Japanese garden Emperor sent four legations to the Court of the Chinese Sui Dynasty.

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5.

Between 630 and 838 CE, the Japanese garden court sent fifteen more legations to the court of the Tang Dynasty.

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6.

In 612 CE, the Empress Suiko had a Japanese garden built with an artificial mountain, representing Shumi-Sen, or Mount Sumeru, reputed in Hindu and Buddhist legends to be located at the centre of the world.

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7.

In 794 CE, at the beginning of the Heian period, the Japanese garden court moved its capital to Heian-kyo (present-day Kyoto).

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8.

Layout of the Japanese garden itself was strictly determined according to the principles of traditional Chinese geomancy, or Feng Shui.

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9.

The south Japanese garden is famous for its cherry blossom in spring, and for azaleas in the early summer.

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10.

Japanese garden monks went again to study in China, and Chinese monks came to Japan, fleeing the Mongol invasions.

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11.

The term Zen Japanese garden appears in English writing in the 1930s for the first time, in Japan, or comes up even later, from the 1950s.

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12.

Japanese garden was a monk, a ninth-generation descendant of the Emperor Uda and a formidable court politician, writer and organizer, who armed and financed ships to open trade with China, and founded an organization called the Five Mountains, made up of the most powerful Zen monasteries in Kyoto.

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13.

Japanese garden was responsible for the building of the zen gardens of Nanzen-ji, Saiho-ji, and Tenryu-ji.

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14.

Three hundred Japanese garden-builders worked on the project, digging the lakes and installing seven hundred boulders in a space of 540 square metres.

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15.

The Japanese garden was designed to be seen from the veranda of the main pavilion, or from the "Hall of the Pure View", located on a higher elevation in the Japanese garden.

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16.

Sen no Rikyu decreed that the Japanese garden should be left unswept for several hours before the ceremony, so that leaves would be scattered in a natural way on the path.

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17.

Edo period saw the widespread use of a new kind of Japanese garden architecture, called, which means literally "building according to chosen taste".

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18.

The Japanese garden buildings were arranged so that were always seen from a diagonal, rather than straight on.

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19.

The Japanese garden became an extension of the landscape architecture with the building.

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20.

Sometimes one or more rocks, called, are placed in seemingly random locations in the Japanese garden, to suggest spontaneity, though their placement is carefully chosen.

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21.

The Japanese garden was designed to be seen from the main building and its verandas, or from small pavilions built for that purpose.

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22.

Sometimes if they were part of a temple Japanese garden, they were painted red, following the Chinese tradition, but for the most part they were unpainted.

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23.

Snow lanterns, like this one in Kenroku-en Japanese garden, have wide brims which catch the snow, to create picturesque scenes.

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24.

Nothing in a Japanese garden is natural or left to chance; each plant is chosen according to aesthetic principles, either to hide undesirable sights, to serve as a backdrop to certain garden features, or to create a picturesque scene.

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25.

Pine trees at Kenroku-en Japanese garden supported by braces to support the weight of snow without breaking.

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26.

Landscape gardener Seyemon Kusumoto wrote that the Japanese generate "the best of nature's handiwork in a limited space".

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27.

The style of Japanese garden takes its name from the roji, or path to the teahouse, which is supposed to inspire the visitor to meditation to prepare him for the ceremony.

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28.

In Japanese culture, garden-making is a high art, equal to the arts of calligraphy and ink painting.

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29.

One painter who influenced the Japanese garden was Josetsu, a Chinese Zen monk who moved to Japan and introduced a new style of ink-brush painting, moving away from the romantic misty landscapes of the earlier period, and using asymmetry and areas of white space, similar to the white space created by sand in zen gardens, to set apart and highlight a mountain or tree branch or other element of his painting.

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30.

Japanese garden became chief painter of the Shogun and influenced a generation of painters and garden designers.

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31.

Japanese garden writes, however, that as the gardens have been introduced into the Western world, they have become more Americanized, decreasing their natural beauty.

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