In quite another way the imagination may be stirred through the perception of materials in the garden, formed into abstract designs, or, on a small scale, made to symbolize grand features of the natural landscape (see Plates 11 and 87 ).
2. Some Human
Principles
A STROLL in a garden affects our senses of touch, sight, sound, and smell. The sense of touch is affected by feelings of muscular activity and memories of tactile sensations. So is it also with sound and sight and smell, recalling memories from the past. These sensations stimulate perceptions, which then lead on to the formation of intellectual concepts. These three compose the materials of our imagination. The pleasure of a sensation is determined by its duration, intensity, and character. We derive pleasure from perception by discovering esthetic harmonies and unities, while pleasure in intellection arises from relating our concepts.
Any design to be successful must stimulate recognition of the universality of experience. This applies to gardens as well as to other works of art. A successful garden then must satisfy certain needs felt by the people who use it. These needs are for logical, economic, esthetic, and spiritual unity. They require the presentation of truth, the satisfaction of a physical need, the apprehension of a complete esthetic totality, and finally man's identification with nature and his God.
Logical Unity. We love to look at things that are logical, the reflections of truth, and the realities of our environment and daily lives. We respect sincerity and abhor falseness. We appreciate what we can understand and feel and know, but we hate to be fooled. We want genuine things about us. If we have to choose between artificial roses, no matter how beautifully and artfully they are contrived, and a bed of modest violets, we would still prefer the latter. We reject sham and look for what is real.
Economic Unity. When we seek the satisfaction of a physical need we are simply choosing what we can put to use. This is economic unity which is easily grasped. We tend to select what makes sense and has for us some practical value, and we discard the senseless and useless. Thus, for example, a young family needs a simple garden where the growing children can play without the parents' worrying that they are ruining the garden and with the least risk of injury to the children. In such circumstances a fish pond or intricate flower and shrubbery arrangements would be disastrous. Or, a retired couple who love to work in their garden need a place which will challenge their creative energies, providing a happy way to pass the time that hangs heavy in retirement. Physical needs vary with the individual, but a good garden that satisfies these needs, whatever they be, has economic unity.
Esthetic Unity. We want our garden also to have esthetic unity. It must be a composition that affords pleasure in the beholding because we can immediately appreciate, consciously or unconsciously, harmonious relations in the color, texture, shape, size, attitudes, and intervals of its parts. Stated subjectively, it is a harmony of interest and not merely of objects or characteristics.
If a garden has logical and economic unity but not esthetic unity, it is not a real garden. Art is the missing factor. Design, of course, is not hard and fast. It varies with each project which has its own conditions—the objective ones of the site and the subjective ones of the people who will live on it. In his book Landscape for Living, Garrett Eckbo recognizes how esthetic unity may be captured when he writes:
"Our theory then must point the way to good form in the landscape; but it cannot define it rigidly, on an exclusive, selected basis, with dogma and formulae, rules and regulations,, precedents and measured drawings. We must base ourselves upon a flexible understanding and assimilation of those basic questions of scale, proportion, unity, variety, rhythm, repetition, which have been the primary guides for good men in all fields in all times and places."
Spiritual Unity. Going one step further, granted that a garden has logical, economic, and esthetic unity, if it still lacks a spiritual unity, it has not achieved its final and best purpose. This is the unity which ties the building to its natural environment, and then links the people who live there to both. It means that in the course of living in our house and garden we become a part of it, and it a part of us. This is the unique quality, the ideal of a Japanese garden.
3. Some Intrinsic
Characteristics
THE INTERACTION of primary geographical and cultural factors accounts for the development of Japan's unique arts and especially its gardens. Because Japan is an archipelago of generally mountainous terrain located in the northern latitudes and surrounded by warm ocean currents, it has abundant rainfall, heavy growth of forests, and a temperate climate with pronounced changes from season to season. And, because a small sea separates Japan from the mainland of Asia, its own native folkways were long allowed to develop relatively untouched by outside influences. But, though isolated from the rest of Asia, it was never completely inaccessible. As a result, Japan's early culture of primitive animism and nature worship underwent great changes under the impact of the introduction of the sophistication of China and Korea. Through the synthesis of Japan's native traditions and customs with vigorous Chinese and Korean intellectual, artistic, and religious teachings there developed a new and fuller Japanese culture which attained great subtlety, refinement, and spiritual depth. The strongest influence of all was Buddhism.
The Buddhist religion itself had felt the formative effects of Confucian and Taoist ideals and philosophy as it passed through China in the long journey from India to Japan. And, within the world of Buddhism, it was the sect of Zen that left the deepest impression on Japanese art. From this penetrating contact emerged the spiritual concept of man's partnership with nature. This concept became the hallmark of Japanese painting, architecture, literature, and, not least, of Japanese gardens. We shall term this humanized naturalism.
Humanized Naturalism. Partnership with nature requires that man and nature be on very familiar terms. Thus, the Japanese artist went out to study nature in all its varied forms. He examined it at close-up and from afar so that while executing his art he was able to visualize all aspects of nature under all conditions in all seasons. The very nature of this process however, meant that what the artist could give was always his subjective interpretation. The garden artist too could never merely copy nature. The naturalness of Japanese gardens became an essence of some aspect of nature, modest or grand, interpreted by the garden artist as his impression of real nature. In this process his deep reverence for nature was implicit.
Partnership and familiarity with nature soon revealed to the garden artist several artistic truths, He saw that the over-all impression one receives from nature is one of strong asymmetry. Though in minute details, such as the arrangement of a flower's stamen and pistil, the shape of a leaf, or snow crystals, nature might be symmetrical, still the larger view of nature revealed just the opposite. This observation became a principle of design of the landscape garden, but here nature's violent asymmetry became tamed and balanced by the humanism of man.
Color Plate 5. The off-white gravel groundcover provides an astringent contrast with the bright reds of the autumn foliage and the soft, dark tones of the rocks and evergreen plantings. (Shugaku-in Imperial Villa, Kyoto.)
Color Plates 6 & 7. This is the prospect that greets you when you pass through the street gate into the front garden of this private residence. The walk is of three-inch-thick granite slabs set in a bed of sand, with dry, hairline joints. The straightforward formality of the pattern of the walk is offset by the abstract shape of the gravel "pool," the natural rocks set in and around its shoreline, the moss groundcover, and the shrub plantings. Since this picture was taken shortly after the garden was completed, the moss had not yet taken hold and spread