Designing a Japanese style garden for a home is popular around the world. The gardens are designed keeping in mind the changing seasons. With the change in seasons the Japanese gardens changes too. As the plants and trees grow, they are cut and pruned and given clean and artistic shapes. They are high maintenance but the end result is always pleasing to the eye and enhances the beautiful experience of strolling in a Japanese garden.
Every Japanese garden is a work of art. It has various elements like terraces, paths, small hills, stone designs, verandas and even buildings woven into it harmoniously. There are some traditional types in Japanese style garden like Karesansui Gardens, Tsukiyama Gardens and Chaniwa Gardens among several know garden types.
The Karesansui Garden:
These are dry landscape gardens that use stones, gravel and moss to create different natural landscapes like mountains, islands, boats, seas and rivers in an abstract way. These gardens are inspired by Zen Buddhism and usually used for meditation and prayer. These dry gardens do not have water unlike other Japanese gardens. Instead raked gravel or sand is used to represent it. Beautiful and artistic rocks and gravel are chosen to represent various facets of nature. To further enhance the effect moss is used. These beautiful, abstract gardens are great example of a Japanese style garden.
Tsukiyama Gardens:
Tsukiyama means the creation of artificial hills. These gardens try to recreate famous landscapes from China and Japan in a miniature form using several elements like small ponds, streams, stones, waterfalls, swimming koi fish or carp, hills, flower trees, paths and bridges. These parks, which are often a faithful reproduction of the real scenery, are best enjoyed by strolling through the circular paths laid out around the garden. These gardens try to create an illusion of more space by using little plants to block out views of city buildings and trying to focus the attention of the viewer on a nearby mountain. This way it appears as if the mountain is part of the garden.
Chaniwa Gardens or Tea Gardens:
Tea ceremonies or services are an important part of Japanese culture. It is only natural that they should have gardens where these ceremonies are held. Chaniwa gardens are especially meant for these occasions. A teahouse set in the garden is used for holding the tea ceremonies. This uses a simple style in creating the hut and the garden with stepping-stones that lead to the teahouse. Lanterns and stone basins are part of the garden. The stone basins contain water where the guests purify themselves before a ceremony.
Apart from there other Japanese Style Garden like those viewed from residential places called Kanshoh style gardens which can be created in your front yard, strolling gardens called Kaiyu–Shiki can be done all round your home or if you have sprawling lands, pond gardens that can be viewed from a boat need to have water body to appreciate its beauty.
The use of artistic rocks, bamboo plants, and evergreens is common factors in many gardens. The special rocks come from distant parts of Japan. Lanterns are placed in strategic places like besides stone basins; rocks are used to construct bridges, pathways and to represent mountains of China. You won’t find fountains in traditional Japanese gardens. Instead you will see uneven streams flowing over irregular terrain. Dry ponds and streams represented by raked gravel or sand are also important aspect of Japanese style garden.
