Refreshment for the spirit Print E-mail
Written by Carolle Doyle, 2005   

In 1910 London's White City was transformed into a Japanese landscape. An oriental bridge spanned a lake on whose surface pavilions with curious, upturned finials were reflected. 

Over a three-month period, a quarter of a million people gazed in amazement at the garden with its windswept pines and stone lanterns, acers pruned to resemble clouds and mossy rocks. No one had ever seen anything quite like it before. Japan was as remote as the moon in those days and its gardening techniques and gardens were - and still are - unlike any other in the world.

So began our love affair with Japanese gardens and the legacy of that event can be seen at Tatton Park and a handful of the country's great gardens that took up the Japanese theme in the first decades of the 20th century. Alan de Tatton didn't wait for the exhibition to finish; he hired the Japanese workforce that had made the garden and brought them up to his country home in Cheshire. You can go and see the results of their labour today, for in 2001 Tatton's beautiful Japanese garden was restored by Professor Masao Fukuhara of Osaka University of Arts and Sam Youd, Head of Gardens at Tatton.

Serenity

I walked around one afternoon with Sam Youd and together we crossed the rustic wooden bridge that marks the boundary between the English garden where the still waters of the lake reflect colourful banks of rhododendrons and the Japanese garden where pines, trained to look ages old, stand before the gateway to a Shinto shrine. The cedarwood shrine looks down upon Alan de Tatton's serene tea garden.

I followed Sam over the Japanese bridge and into another world.

Here, bronze cranes fish in the still waters of a pool and a stone turtle appears to be swimming upstream. They symbolise the human spirit and to gaze on them is both fortunate and bestows longevity, Sam explained. There is water everywhere, in streams and pools and in stone basins to cleanse those taking part in the Cha No Yu, the Zen tea ceremony.

Dwarf azaleas in pink and purple form low mounds; their colour is fleeting but when the flowers fade the bushes will become green once more, living stones anchoring the garden to the landscape. Saturating the senses with its colour, green moss cushions the ground and seams the faces of rock. A stone lantern is reflected in a pool and a stone pagoda reaches for the sky.

"Every garden needs its Mount Fuji," said Sam, pointing to a green cone topped by white stones. But this is an Englishman's view of Japan for the tea house is more properly a shepherd's hut: delightful, decorative and authentically Japanese but a Zen tea master would raise his eyes in surprise. He would also gaze long and hard at the trees, the beautiful acers that, in Japan, would have been trained to form billowing clouds of red leaves tethered to the earth by slender branches.

It was very difficult to get Fukuhara to understand why the trees should be left unpruned. To prune them would, of course, have been in perfect accord with the Japanese way, but it would have run counter to the origins of the garden itself. For this is an Englishman's garden created to resemble a Japanese garden. Designed 100 years ago, it is as timeless as any of the great gardens in Japan. The Japanese do not sweep away the past and begin again, transforming formal Dutch parterres into parkland and parkland into Victorian bedding: they view the garden as the embodiment of the natural world.

Rocky symbolism

A rock placed within a bed of gravel becomes an island and the gravel becomes the sea. Every day the gravel is raked to form sharp lines of light and shade swirling around the island just as the tide returns each day to lick at the shore. Zen-inspired gardens, such as the world famous rock and gravel garden of Ryoan-ji, are alien to our British way of gardening.

In Cornwall there is one such rock and gravel garden embedded within one of the country's most beautiful Japanese gardens. Robert and Stella Hore have created it in a Cornish valley a few miles from Newquay. I went to the Japanese Garden & Bonsai nursery on a spring morning when the cherry blossom was dripping with moisture and the moss sparkled underfoot. A ribbon of water plashed into a pool where the gold fins of a Koi carp broke the surface. Narrow streams no more than a foot wide have dug deep channels through the mossy banks that are overhung by acers and bamboo.

This is a garden that had its beginnings in London when Robert Hore began to grow Bonzai trees as a hobby because, as he says, "You can create a beech forest in a courtyard." Upon returning to Cornwall, his love of Bonsai became a business and then in 1991 the couple began to create the garden by digging out the pond. The narrow streams that cut through the landscape so realistically were all dug out by hand.

Perfection

As we stood beside the tea house, Robert told me a story about a great Japanese gardener who had spent months preparing for a visit from the Emperor himself. The day of the Imperial visit dawned and as the gardener toured the garden for one last time, he paused in thought and then shook a maple branch until five leaves floated to the earth. The gardener smiled and murmured, "Now, it is perfect."

Sam Youd would understand that story for he is fond of saying that a Japanese garden is only perfect when there is nothing else that can be taken out. Gardens in Japan are created with a very restrained and limited palette. Not for the Japanese a hundred or more varieties; even in the great gardens only a handful of different plant species are used. In a small garden there may be only a lone pine, carefully trained so that it appears to have been twisted by the wind.

Our gardens are never so restrained yet something of the tranquillity of Japan's own gardens filters through. Kingston Lacy's Japanese garden was originally created by an Edwardian lady, Henrietta Bankes, who delighted in making a series of cameo gardens throughout the park. A glade of acers and a grove of flowering cherry trees lead the way to Henrietta's Japanese garden.

Unlike Tatton, where a 'four-eye' bamboo fence surrounds the tea garden, Henrietta's garden is bounded by iron railings. A 'stream' of paddlestones winds its way through the garden beneath bridges towards the tea hut that is a copy of Tatton's. The garden in spring is bright with the unfurling leaves of acers and ragged white petals of magnolia stellata. Tree peonies are so lovely that they melt the heart.

Our Japanese gardens are more abundant and varied in their planting, but like the gardens they imitate, they are serene places that refresh the spirit.
 
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