Planning on creating your own Japanese style garden for your home or office? You want ideas and inspiration for deciding the type of garden and what to put into it? Visit as many Japanese gardens as possible in your area. If there are none then study Japanese garden pictures.
You may not get the actual, real feel of being in that place but you’ll get the general idea of it. You’ll need really detailed pictures to study the various aspects of Japanese garden designs. There are many websites dedicated to Japanese gardens and you should be able to study a lot of photos with explanations for the different elements in Japanese gardens.
Japanese gardens designs came to Japan from China along with Buddhism. These gardens are steeped in religious and cultural traditions. Garden designing in Japan is an art form similar to Calligraphy and Painting. Every stone, rock and the gravel in the gardens are chosen with care so the creator can represent accurately what he wants to convey.
For outsiders it is really difficult to understand these deeper meanings unless we devote time and effort to understand Japanese and Oriental culture. Even if we can’t appreciate their underlying message we can still appreciate the beauty and the aesthetics that are at the core of all Japanese gardens.
If you look at detailed Japanese garden pictures you will notice that they follow some basics in designs. One is reduced scale, enclosing spaces, framing a view, focusing on distant object which makes it as if it is a part of the garden, borrowed scenery, symbolic elements and balance in every sense of word.
For instance the sand gardens, which were created by Zen Buddhist monks, are meant for meditation purposes. These gardens have very little greenery in them. The main elements here are stones, gravel, sand and bare minimum of plants usually a bit of moss. All these are artistically arranged to represent nature or an ancient battle scene. There is no water only raked gravel to represent it and no mountains or hills just stones arranged creatively to denote them and so on. These gardens are so delicately arranged that traditional Japanese won’t enter but rather observe it from outside so has to not disturb the artistic creation.
Tsukiyama gardens are representation scenery and landscapes from China and Japan. They are faithful representation of the original scenes. They use pools, ponds, streams, bridges, pathways, trees, flowering plants, and lanterns to recreate the original scene. The designers of these gardens love to frame a scene and surprise a visitor with their strategic placement of design elements.
For instance a bridge may be hidden from view by shrubs and trees and as you climb a few steps and suddenly come upon it you are both delighted and surprised thus there is an element of mystery in Japanese gardens. These may not be clear to you by just studying Japanese garden pictures or photos. Another thing is drawing attention to some detail, which you might otherwise miss. A lantern is placed and your gaze is drawn in to a small pool or a gurgling stream, which again is meant to excite and fascinate the visitors.
