Meditations On The Japanese Garden

Gardens of Gravel and Sand

A collection of photographs of nothing more than raked gravel and sand, Leonard Koren challenges the many myths surrounding the ‘Zen gardens’ of Japan in short essays interspersed throughout this book.

Old Kyoto

The essential guidebook for those looking to find the true spirit of Japan’s most cherished city. This second edition (2005) of Old Kyoto is completely updated with revised maps, prices, directions, descriptions, and general information. The old shops and inns of Kyoto can still be found on narrow backstreets, under the heavy, tiled rooftops of traditional machiya dwellings.

Mirei Shigemori - Modernizing The Japanese Garden

Mirei Shigemori (1896-1975), a historian trained in painting and ikebana, is increasingly admired for his contemporary Japanese garden designs. This book explores 10 major Shigemori works, and is the first monograph about his work available outside of Japan.

Japanese Garden Intensiv Seminar

The Research Center for Japanese Garden Art is hosting its annual Japanese Garden Intensiv Seminar in Kyoto, Japan from October 22 - November 3, 2007 this year. Anyone interested in attending should apply soon. The center, which is affiliated with the Kyoto University of Art and Design, has a renowned staff of internationally published experts.

A Guide to the Gardens of Kyoto

The only guide to the gardens of Kyoto published in the west, this book is an indispensible aide to anyone planning a trip on his own. With over 50 listings it provides the location, opening hours and and area maps for all described gardens.

Japanese Gardens: Right Angle and Natural Form

“The Japanese garden is not simply nature, ... The Japanese garden is and has always been nature crafted by man. It belongs to the realm of architecture and is, at its best, nature as art.”

Originally titled “The Architecture of the Japanese Garden”, Günter Nitschke has created one of the great monographs written about the Japanese garden in the West. Inspired by his meetings with renowned historian Mirei Shigemori, it is the culmulation of many years of studying how the stereotypes evolved over time.

Taking the reader on a grand tour of not only the gardens themselves but the historical periods during which they evolved, this book contains a wealth of historical information. The narrative text is supported by many of the authors own photographs, old woodcuts taken from ancient texts, and plans that show the details of gardens’ position and layout.

The result is a visual history of the Japanese garden that is informed by a deep understanding of how the social, political and cultural factors influenced the development of Japanese architecture and the surrounding gardens. In fact this ‘architectural’ perspective is unique to Günter Nitschke’s book, and is what differentiates it from other monographs that have been written.

Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers

“Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.”

So begins the introduction to this singular and essential book about the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi. Long associated with the Japanese tea ceremony, only few writers have tried to give a perspective on this complex term that describes the sensibility for many aesthetic decisions made in the design and selection of materials for the tea ceremony – ranging from tea utensils, to flower arrangements, to the mood and spatial qualities of tea huts and the gardens that contain them.

Leonard Koren engages us with his views as an artist informed by many years of living with and observing all things Japanese. The book itself is an illustration of the wabi-sabi aesthetic: the careful choice of the paper, the binding, the type-setting and photographs throughout the text convey the essence of what the author is writing about.

For those that have a sense of the unique beauty and quality of the Japanese crafts, architecture and gardens, but have never been able to quite put their finger on the underlying aesthetic, this book creates a context for understanding and further discovery.

Japanese Garden Design

Of all the monographs on Japanese garden design, this book provides the best overview of the underlying cultural context that has been the basis for its development.

While this book does not desribe individual gardens in detail, it adresses both the historical context and the many other influences that have shaped the aesthetic of the Japanese garden. More so than in any previous monograph, Marc Peter Keane points out the influences of Japan’s prehistoric period, Shintoism and Buddhism as it relates to the veneration of landscape and nature.

He also describes the effect that geomancy, poetry and ink brush painting had on the evolution of garden prototypes and subject matter. Beyond that he pays special attention to the physical setting, architectural context, aesthetics, social and economical environment in which each of the garden prototypes evolved into todays classifications.

The book is beautifully ilustrated with a large number of color photographs and drawings by the author, that support and visualize the points made in the well-written text. I believe this is currently the best monograph, in that it gives an excellent introduction to the Japanes garden and its cultural heritage to international audiences, without getting lost in the description of details of individual gardens or the symbolic meanings attributed to specific design elements.

The Art of Setting Stones & Other Writings from the Japanese Garden

I was originally inspired to start this website after reading this set of essays by Marc Peter Keane. As opposed to most of the other books described in this bibliography, which are objective descriptions of the Japanese garden and its history, this book has a deeply subjective perspective.

The author made Kyoto his home after graduating from Cornell University’s department of landscape architecture, first as a research fellow of Kyoto University, and later as a landscape architect and writer. He is currently adjunct professor at the Kyoto University of Art and Design, and splits his time between lecturing and praticing landscape architecture from his offices in Ithaca, New York.

The 8 essays desribe his intimate experience of the Japanese garden and shed light on both the cultural origins as well as the personal meanings he has derived from his years of study and contemplation.

His unique perspective is informed by a deep understanding of the historical context of the gardens combined with an appreciation of the spiritual traditions that have defined their aesthetics.

Each of the essays is introduced by a black clayboard illustration done by the author, adding a visual interpretation to his often deeply philisophical musings, making this book the most enjoyable writing I have found to date on the Japanese garden.

The Gardens of Japan

As a monograph on the Japanese garden this book contains a wealth of some of the best color photographs currently in print. Although the text gives a general overview of garden history and design elements, I find it somewhat lacking in structure and completeness.

This book does contain an excellent description of the origins of the garden at Saiho-ji, also known as the Moss Temple garden, and it is a varied collection of material that will amuse the reader, especially the anecdotal accounts of the lives and statements of the more legendary figures of Japanese garden design.

The Japanese have created a wealth of myths surrounding these figures, that have gained a special place in their cultural history, but in recent years most scholars have started to question the extent to which they were involved in the actual design and building of the gardens that are attributed to them.