Japanese Gardens (日本庭園), Read Like an Ink Painting

Japanese has one word for two arts. 山水 (sansui), “mountains and water,” means landscape: in painting, an ink landscape is a sansui-ga; in gardening, the famous dry garden is a kare-sansui, a “dry” landscape. The overlap is not an accident of vocabulary. A Japanese garden and an ink painting are composed by the same rules, and some of the people who made the great gardens were painters and Zen calligraphers.

That makes a calligraphy site a good place to learn to look at gardens. This guide shows how to read a garden the way you would read a scroll, what the brushed plaques at the gate are telling you, and how the main garden types differ.

The word on paper

庭 sits under the radical 广, a roof or overhang, with 廷 inside: a courtyard by a building. In 廷, the long base stroke 廴 is written after the part above it, so 庭 is written roof first, then the inner part, then the long sweep along the bottom. 園 is enclosed in a box, 囗. Write the left side, then the top and right side, then everything inside, and close the bottom of the box last, as with 国 (country). The rule is easy to remember in a garden: build the walls, plant the inside, then shut the gate.

山 and 水 are among the oldest pictures in the script: three peaks, and a stream with spray at either side. Put together, they are the whole subject of both the painter and the gardener.

Gardens and ink: the same composition

Look at an ink landscape scroll and then at a good Japanese garden, and the shared rules appear one by one.

• A few elements stand for a whole world. A painter suggests a mountain range with three brushstrokes and a wash; a gardener sets three rocks in moss. Neither copies nature in detail.
• Empty space is part of the work. In painting, the white of the paper becomes mist, water or sky. In a garden, raked gravel, open moss or still water does the same job. Both are the ma that lets the placed elements speak.
• Near and far. A scroll places dark, detailed things in front and pale, simple shapes behind. A garden does the same with large rocks and trees near the viewer and smaller, softer forms further back, so a small space feels deep.
• Asymmetry. Rocks are grouped in uneven numbers, never in tidy pairs, just as a calligrapher avoids placing a character dead centre.
• Suggestion over statement. Paths and plantings hide part of the view and reveal it in glimpses (見え隠れ, miegakure), the same beauty of the half-seen that the aesthetics of yūgen describes.

The oldest Japanese manual on garden-making, the 作庭記 (Sakuteiki), written around the 11th century and attributed to the courtier Tachibana no Toshitsuna, already thinks this way. It advises building gardens on the model of real landscapes, and one of its best-known phrases tells the maker to set stones by “following the request of the stone”: look at each rock and place it the way it seems to want to stand. A calligrapher who lets the brush find the shape of a stroke would recognise the idea.

The painters and monks who made gardens

Several famous gardens are linked by tradition to artists of the brush.

• Musō Soseki (夢窓疎石, 1275–1351), a Zen monk, is credited with the gardens of Saihō-ji (the “moss temple”) and Tenryū-ji in Kyoto. His calligraphy, too, is among the most prized of Zen ink writing.
• Sesshū (雪舟, 1420–1506), the great ink painter, is traditionally said to have designed several gardens in western Japan. Whether he laid out each one himself is debated, but the attribution itself shows how naturally Japanese culture links the painter and the garden.

Reading the plaques

At many temples and old gardens, a wooden board hangs over the gate or under the eaves with a name brushed in large characters. This is a 扁額 (hengaku), a name plaque. It may name the temple, a hall, a tea house or the garden itself.

Garden names are often taken from classical texts, so the plaque tells you the idea behind the place. Kenrokuen (兼六園) in Kanazawa means “the garden that combines six,” after six qualities a fine garden was said to need, including spaciousness, seclusion and views. Kōrakuen (後楽園), a name used for gardens in both Okayama and Tokyo, is usually traced to a line by the Song-dynasty statesman Fan Zhongyan: a person of virtue worries before everyone else worries, and enjoys only after everyone else has enjoyed. When you see a plaque, it is worth finding out what it says. (For help with reading brushed characters and seals, see how to read a Japanese calligraphy scroll.)

The three main types

Karesansui (枯山水), the dry garden. Raked gravel for water, rocks for mountains or islands, few or no plants. It is viewed from a fixed spot, like a hanging scroll, and contemplated rather than entered. It has its own guide: the Zen garden.

Tsukiyama (築山), the hill-and-pond strolling garden. Artificial hills, a pond, streams, bridges and winding paths that lead you through a miniature landscape. Kenrokuen, Kōrakuen and the Katsura villa are of this kind. Here the garden is less a single scroll than a handscroll: the view unrolls as you walk.

Roji (露地), the tea garden. The path to a tea house, rustic and quiet, with stepping stones, a low stone basin for rinsing the hands, and lanterns. It prepares the guest for the tea room, where the first thing they will look at is a scroll in the alcove.

The other rules you cannot see

• Borrowed scenery (借景, shakkei). A distant mountain or temple roof framed into the view so it seems part of the garden.
• Symbolism. Islands shaped as a crane and a turtle for long life; a group of three stones for a Buddhist trinity.
• Concealed artifice. Every rock is chosen and set, every pine pruned for years, so that the whole looks untouched, as in bonsai.

What a Japanese garden is not

It is not a garden with Japanese props. A red bridge and a lantern do not make one. The principles do.

It is not wild or low-maintenance. The natural look is the result of constant, careful work.

It is not all “Zen rock gardens.” The dry garden is one type among several.

How to look at one

1. Find the viewpoint or the route. A dry garden has a place to sit; a strolling garden has a path. The composition was designed from there.
2. Read it like a scroll. Find the foreground, the middle and the distance, and notice where the “white space” is.
3. Look up for the plaque. Then look for the borrowed scenery beyond the wall.

Where to go next

• Its most distilled form — the Zen garden, and the Zen calligraphy that hangs beside it.
• The characters — 山 (mountain) and 水 (water).
• Reading brushed names — how to read a Japanese calligraphy scroll.
• The space and the half-seen — ma and yūgen.
• Sibling arts of composed nature — ikebana and bonsai.

A Japanese garden is an ink landscape you can stand in. It uses the painter’s word, the painter’s empty space and, often, the calligrapher’s brush on the plaque at the gate. Learn to read it as a scroll, and a garden you once walked through in ten minutes will hold you for an hour.