Since ancient times in Japan, Japanese garden has been seen as an important place where people can become united with the nature and the spirits together, so they have been intended to create miniature landscapes to bring the four seasons close to them.
Meanwhile, the gardens have been closely associated with their living habits and daily events. There is a word read in Japanese “ka-tei” meaning “home”: “ka” means “house”, and “tei” means “garden”. As implied by the word, the garden is also seen as an extension of the daily living space integrated with their houses. So they used to plan to design their gardens as simple as possible to save the trouble of daily maintenance.
Though there are many books instructing how to make the Japanese garden designs nowadays, one who is going to carry through with creating it by himself all would want some doing about it. Because there are certain concept that one has to grasp to successfully get at the heart of the Japanese garden. Find the art of the Japanese gardens to create very unique garden design of your own!
Philosophy of garden designing
In contrast to the geometric arrangements of trees and rocks in Western-style gardens, the traditional Japanese garden is a scenic composition mimicking nature. The essence of Japanese garden philosophy is just the concept of bringing nature and the four seasons closely. First of all, we would have to learn about Japanese concept of nature to grasp to get at the heart of the Japanese garden designs.
Philosophy of garden designing
Styles of Japanese garden Design
Traditional Japanese gardens can be broadly categorized into two types by the aspect of its design concept; those which focus on naturalism, and those with religious symbolism. Seeing from the standpoint of designing, traditional Japanese gardens can be divided into two basic types; the gardens that have water in the form of a pond or a flowing rivulet, and the dry “rock gardens”, called “sekitei” in Japanese.