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GARDENING |
I have this thing for Japanese gardens. Always have had, really.
That feeling has been much more acute of late because of a dream I had recently, in which a friend was showing me how to create a Japanese water garden. I woke from the dream full of peace and delight. So now I'm trying to recreate the picture from the dream in my tiny back yard behind the house I rent in Philadelphia.
I'm taking my time in designing
the garden, trying to curb my impatience to be done, and absorbing as much
information as I can about Japanese courtyard gardens, tea gardens and
tsubo gardens.
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Admittedly, designing and
building
the garden will be somewhat challenging. Apart from having very little
spare cash for the project, I want to make most of the garden's features
portable so I can take them with me when I leave in a year or
so.
So I'm thinking of building containers for trees and shrubs, a bamboo spout with the smallest available granite basin, and very small decorative rocks. Disguising the worst features of the existing garden will require something that will look at least a little like bamboo fencing. All suggestions gratefully received... |
If Japanese garden design interests you, you should check out this wonderful site that gives you a virtual tour of Seiwa-en, a Japanese garden in the Missouri Botanical Garden. The network of pages you can follow from this link are all excerpted from a CD devoted to a tour of the garden.
If you want to read up on Japanese garden design, there are a number of good books available on the topic, including:
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Incidentally, the friend in
my dream who helped me design the garden died of Amyotrophic Lateral
Sclerosis
(also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease). I had the dream the night
before his funeral.
If you want to be part of the
struggle to combat ALS, you can click here
to get to the ALS Association webpage and find out some of the ways you
can help.
RIP, Bill. |