turning Japanese

After my three day stint of pot lifting leading seamlessly into the committee meeting, I'd expected to luxuriate in a lie-in this morning, but woke up anyway at seven, my body announcing that while rather stiff it didn't want to sleep any more, thank you very much.  I could hear the rain drumming on the roof, and didn't even bother to put on my gardening clothes when I got dressed.  Each day when I get up I look at the view from the bathroom window down the back garden.  It is one of the key views of the garden, though nobody ever sees it except for us, and it is amazing how in the past few days the leaves have opened in a great rush.  Before I could sit down and enjoy my muesli I had to go across the back lawn and check that all was well with a couple of potted acers and some of the Hamamelis which did not seem to be so leafy as the others, but on close inspection they were fine.  The new little leaves look fat and healthy, and haven't been caught by a late frost, nor have I been gulled by the frequent but light rain into letting the plants get dry at the root.  It must be that those varieties are naturally a little later to leaf up than some of the others.

Then the rain stopped, so I moved some pots of tulips that were almost open from their spot by the greenhouse where they have been growing all winter to their destined display area in Italian garden in the turning circle.  I got some green stains on my non-gardening jeans doing this.  After that I wasn't quite sure what to do.  The forecast was for heavy rain, and it was cold, and I had my monthly Pilates lesson booked for the early afternoon.  On the other hand, it was not actually raining at that moment, and as we have seen, moments of not raining now can stretch to a whole morning.

I decided to have the day off.  I was tired after the weekend, the thermometer read nine degrees, and the lawn had squelched with every step when I went to inspect the pots on the far deck.  I could have crawled around weeding the gravel in the top part of the garden, and planted out the thrift I bought at Beth Chatto the other day, and the horned poppies, and some sempervivums whose pots disintegrated last winter and which I am going to recycle as ground cover.  Instead I decided to light the fire in the study and settle down with a book.  Our Ginger was very pleased with the fire, and spent the morning simpering on the hearth rug, and the fat indignant tabby came to see me and bounced on the arm of my chair and purred a lot, a rare display of affection that was only partly spoilt by the moment when she dipped her tail in my tea.

I have been reading about Japanese gardens, for no particular reason except that I had the books out to look at ideas for the path to the new deck, and leafing through them for relevant photos reminded me that I liked them and hadn't looked at them for a while.  The book about Japanese gardens in North America is written as a design crib for western garden makers, and I can't remember why or when I bought it, but is a pleasant enough easy read with good pictures.  Japanese Garden Design by Marc P. Keane is a more serious study of the origins, conventions and meanings of Japanese gardens in Japan.  He is a trained landscape architect, from America, but lived and worked in Japan for years, researching and designing gardens.  I think he knows his stuff, and his book featured on Writtle reading lists.  My favourite tutor at Writtle wrote her doctoral thesis on Japanese gardens in the UK, and at one time it looked as though she had landed a book deal, but nothing seemed to emerge from that, which is a pity.  I'd have bought a copy.  The Gardens of Japan by Professor Teiji Ito has been on my Amazon wishlist since November 2004, which tells you that my enthusiasm for Japanese gardens has probably diminished slightly in the last eight years.

I am cautious about dotting faux Japanese lanterns about the place.  I'd rather the objects in my garden had some cultural resonance for me.  The museum copy of the head of a muse is fine.  That relates to the European renaissance, the UK tradition of the grand tour and, if you like, the fact that Colchester was a Roman city, and sits comfortably, if rather vaguely, in my cultural hinterland.  I mean, I did the hypocaust in primary school, and watched I, Claudius in the 1970s, so I grew up with the Romans.  The pieces of driftwood are pretty sound.  They refer to the picturesque tradition of the stumpery, and Derek Jarman's garden (haven't been there, but read the book, lots of times), and my own beach combing expeditions, and hours spent on the water.  I know where I am with bits of driftwood.

The rest of the collection is equally grounded, apart from the museum copy of the buddha.  Given that I am not a buddhist, and all I know about buddhism was derived from reading one book (by a retired catholic nun) and going along to a few meetings of the Friends of the Western Buddhist order, and a superb exhibition at the RA some years ago that left me feeling that whatever it was that those smiling buddha figures knew, I wanted to know it, according to my own aesthetic principles I should not have a statue of the buddha in the garden.  And it is a western design cliche.  But it is a good copy of an extremely nice statue, and I like it, and you do not have to be a buddhist to embrace the principle of mindfulness, which I have found a useful concept.  Trying to pay attention to the moment makes the moment more interesting, and from a practical point of view curbs my natural tendency to clumsiness, since half the time when I squash, drop, break or tread on things I realise it was because I was thinking about something else at the time and not really noticing what I was doing. It is not even a solely buddhist or eastern concept, given that Montaigne talks about it, even if he (or rather his translators) don't call it that.  So the buddha stays, because I like it.  But I would not know what I was saying with a Japanese lantern.

The standard college essay answer about What Japanese Gardens Can Teach Us was that they taught us about the arrangement of space.  They do.  Also about attention to detail, in terms of all that raked gravel, and carefully arranged fallen leaves.  Also restraint, in terms of the limited plant palette.  Also about the tension between the growing and dynamic, and the static.  Japanese gardens involve an amazing amount of pruning, to keep all those acers and pines and azaleas exactly the right shape, and as far as possible the same size for ever.  It is explained in Niwaki: Pruning, training and shaping trees the Japanese way by Jake Hobson, another westerner captivated by Japanese gardening.  Compare and contrast with the western assumption that it is in the nature of gardens to change, as trees grow and the amount of light in the garden decreases.  If you want nice design details to inspire your own garden, I'd give the knots tied round pieces of bamboo a miss, as well as the lanterns (too self-consciously Look at me, I'm doing a Japanese garden) but some of the stone paths provide wonderful leaping off points for inventing your own thing.  So do the clipped evergreens, and indeed our garden contains increasing quantities of mound-pruned box as ground cover, the idea nicked from the garden of Hugh Johnson, who in turn acknowledges his oriental source.

A day spent by a fire, with some cats, some books, and some healthy exercise in the middle, is a day well spent.  I didn't make any physical progress on the garden, but I made some mental progress thinking about it, and gardens in general.  It would be nice to be able to look at a Japanese garden from the standpoint of understanding the culture and history, and I don't, and I'm never going to, but even approaching them as an outsider, they provide much food for thought.