the huntington’s japanese garden

After vis­it­ing the dense and some­what fre­netic new Chi­nese Gar­den at the Hunt­ing­ton I was feel­ing like I needed to unwind a bit. For­tu­nately a short walk at the Hunt­ing­ton deliv­ers you from the Chi­nese Gar­den to the Japan­ese Gar­den.

Along the way, before you get to the gar­den itself, as if in a cal­cu­lated attempt to tran­si­tion the viewer from one gar­den to the next, you pass a cou­ple bloom­ing plants that have “Japan” in their species name. Although most of the camel­lias in bloom were the sansan­quas, a few of the Camel­lia japon­ica plants were start­ing their bloom.

And there was this perky yel­low species, Far­lugium japon­icum–with a plant label (Thank you!–I love my plant labels).

One of the first details that I noticed in the Japan­ese Gar­den was this walk­way edge detail con­sist­ing of lit­tle loops of thin bamboo.

Whereas many of the hard­scape ele­ments in the Chi­nese Gar­den seemed to be built to last for the centuries–this photo shows one of the edg­ing details there–the frag­ile lit­tle detail in the Japan­ese Gar­den appeared to be set up to cel­e­brate the ephemeral.

All the approaches to the gar­den deliver the vis­i­tor to high van­tage points over­look­ing plant­i­ngs around a small pond. A moon bridge pro­vides a focal point.

A recre­ated tra­di­tional upper-class Japan­ese home occu­pies the high­est spot in the garden.

Its doors slide open so that the view from the house is of this gar­den. Stand­ing out­side, you can peer in and get a sense of how life indoors would look like and feel. This struc­ture was moved to this site in 1912, so it and the gar­dens have been around many more years than the Chi­nese Gar­den next door.

Steps from the home lead down and then back up to a walled garden.

A broad walk­way divides the gar­den into two parts. To one side is a sym­bolic gar­den of stones and raked gravel, or Kare­san­sui.

To the other side is a sim­ple plant­ing of clipped aza­leas, ginkgo trees and what I’m guess­ing is lawn. The lawn and the tops of the aza­leas mounds, how­ever, were cov­ered with fallen leaves off the ginkgo trees. I loved this space in its sim­plic­ity and could have spent hours there.

A very few of the ginkgo trees still held on to their star­tling yel­low leaves.

But most of the leaves on the ground were pro­gress­ing from bright yel­low to tan to brown.

Here’s a sug­ges­tion for the Hunt­ing­ton: How about set­ting up a ginkko hot­line or RSS or Twit­ter feed? Desert parks com­monly offer wild­flower hot­lines to alert you of peak flow­er­ing. Some­thing sim­i­lar to let you know when the falling leaves would be at their most spec­tac­u­lar would be great too. Still, it was a gor­geous effect, and it high­lighted the nat­ural process of bright yel­low leaves aging into less col­or­ful ones.


After the walled gar­den is a bon­sai court con­tain­ing some spec­tac­u­lar spec­i­mens in a sim­ple, rus­tic set­ting. The Hunt­ing­ton is in the process of enlarg­ing the dis­play area to make room for more bon­sai.

My last shots from the Japan­ese Gar­den are of two gor­geous stands of bam­boo. A small grove adja­cent to the “model home” has a small wooden path­way through it.

A more mas­sive stand occu­pies a spot at the edge of the gar­den.

Inside the dark thicket Camel­lia sasan­qua blooms.

What is it about a grove of bam­boo that dri­ves vis­i­tors to carve their ini­tials into the culms? Grrrrrrr.

A final look at the rhythms and con­tra­pun­tal inter­play in the bamboo…

December 30 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: • • • • • • | 9 Comments »

some japanese gardens

I just ran across this cool site, a pic­ture gallery page off of Bow­doin College’s Japan­ese gar­dens home page. Though my gar­den, with its patches of heav­ily assorted plant­i­ngs, gen­er­ally doesn’t have much of a Japan­ese gar­den feel, I have a real fond­ness for the stud­ied nat­ural sim­plic­ity of the Japan­ese gar­den aes­thetic. This site has some amaz­ing gar­dens, par­tic­u­larly around Kyoto, and includes the iconic Ryoan-ji raked sand gar­den, plus 28 oth­ers. Each has sev­eral pic­tures, a map, and intro­duc­tion and a brief bit of history.

One of the artists whose pho­tographs got me inter­ested in pho­tog­ra­phy again in the 1980s was David Hock­ney. I’m not sure of his level of infat­u­a­tion with Japan­ese gar­dens, but he did do this strik­ing piece in 1983, a big pho­to­col­lage of the dry gar­den at Ryoan-ji. It’s a lit­tle hard to see in this reduced pic­ture, but he’s pieced together bits of the gar­den, pieces of the sur­round­ing tem­ple, pil­grims to the site and the black plas­tic con­tain­ers of the film he was using to shoot the scene. And if you look close you can also see his socks.

When he was doing these pho­to­col­lages, the story goes that Hock­ney dropped off his film at the neigh­bor­hood quickie photo place. In this pho­to­col­lage you can see the mis­matched print­ing the place did, par­tic­u­larly obvi­ous in the cen­tral sand area. After Hock­ney made the orig­i­nals, these col­lages were then edi­tioned, using Hockney’s neg­a­tives. The peo­ple mak­ing the edi­tion tried to repli­cate Hockney’s orig­i­nals, which in this case meant going through the headaches of doing an inten­tion­ally “bad” job of print­ing the neg­a­tives, try­ing to match the job the local photo place did for Hockney.

These works don’t have the same vivid col­ors that Hockney’s paint­ings do, but they for sure share some of the same sense of space and time. Inspired by cubism, things don’t fit together per­fectly, but your mind pieces the scenes together in a sen­si­ble way any­way. For me these works are almost like sculp­ture in that regard: You can’t see them all at once. Instead of tra­vers­ing the space around an object, though, your eye moves around the image, giv­ing you a sense of space. View­ing the work–a col­lage of images cap­tured over a cer­tain timespan–engages time in a way a sin­gle pho­to­graph typ­i­cally doesn’t.

February 17 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • photography | Tags: • • • • | No Comments »