An in-depth exploration spanning 800 years of the art, essence, and enduring impact of the Japanese garden. The most comprehensive exploration of the art of the Japanese garden published to date, this book covers more than eight centuries of the history of this important genre. Author and garden designer Sophie Walker brings fresh insight to this subject, exploring the Japanese garden in detail through a series of essays and with 100 featured gardens, ranging from ancient Shinto shrines to imperial gardens and contemporary Zen designs. Leading artists, architects, and other cultural practitioners offer personal perspectives in newly commissioned essays.

"Revised and updated, Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art presents new interpretations of the evolution of Japanese garden art. Its depth and much-needed emphasis on a practical context for garden creation will appeal to art and literary historians as well as scholars, students, and appreciators of garden and landscape art, Asian and Western."--BOOK JACKET.

This work presents an approach to practical, hands-on gardening and is also atudy of Japanese aesthetic.

"Bring the art and beauty of Japan to your garden with inspiration from Kyoto Gardens." —HGTV Gardens Featuring beautiful Japanese garden photography and insightful writing, Kyoto Gardens is a labor of love from master photographer Ben Simmons and Kyoto-based writer Judith Clancy. In their rocks and plants, empty spaces and intimate details—Kyoto's gardens manifest a unique ability to provoke thought and delight in equal measure. These varied landscapes meld the sensuality of nature with the disciplines of cosmology, poetry and meditation. Japanese aristocrats created these gardens to display not just wealth and power, but cultural sensitivity and an appreciation for transcendent beauty. A class of professional gardeners eventually emerged, transforming Japanese landscape design into a formalized art. Today, Kyoto's gardens display an enormous range of forms—from rock gardens display of extreme minimalism and subtle hues, to stroll gardens of luscious proportions and vibrant colors. In Kyoto Gardens Simmons' photographs present a fresh and contemporary look at Kyoto's most important gardens. Their beauty is enhanced and humanized by gardeners tending the grounds using the tools of their art. Clancy's graceful text provides historical, aesthetic and cultural context to the Japanese gardens. Combining wonder and rigor, she describes how Kyoto's most beloved gardens remain faithful to their founders' creative spirit and conception. Journey to Kyoto's thirty gardens with just a turn of a page, or use the handy maps to plan your trip.

This beautifully illustrated book offers a practical guide to recreating traditional Japanese-style gardens. Authentic Japanese Gardens is the only book that explains how non-Japanese plants and materials can be used to achieve the natural, minimalist look of Japanese garden designs. This revised, photo-heavy edition features new text and stunning new color photography. Now available in paperback and re-sized to 8.5” x 11”, this book was formerly published as Serene Gardens (ISBN: 978-1-78009-517-2).

**Winner of the 2006 American Horticultural Society Book Award** The Art of the Japanese Garden is the only historical overview of Japanese gardens that covers Japanese gardening culture in one beautiful book. Japanese gardens are rooted in two traditions: an indigenous prehistoric tradition in which patches of graveled forest or pebbled beach were dedicated to nature spirits, and a tradition from China and Korea that included elements such as ponds, streams, waterfalls, rock compositions and a variety of vegetation. The Art of the Japanese Garden traces the development and blending of these two traditions, as well as the inclusion of new features as gardening reached new heights of sophistication on Japanese soil. 300 full-color Japanese garden illustrations and photographs highlight notable gardens in Japan, including graveled courtyards, early aristocratic gardens, esoteric and paradise gardens, Zen gardens, warrior gardens, tea gardens and stroll gardens. Also included are sections on modern trends and Japanese gardens in other countries.

The flowering of Far Eastern culture and philosophy as seen through the remarkable gardens they gave rise to. This classic work was one of the first to reveal the full meaning and symbolism of the gardens of China and Japan, and to treat them as serious works of art and material culture, rather than as quaint and pretty plantings. In spirit, the art of these gardens is akin to landscape painting; in form it is close to sculpture. Yet it is really quite different, a unique art based upon the choice and arrangement of natural materials in the creation of a scene that has the power to transform and inspire the viewer and gardener. Loraine E. Kuck begins her study with the naturalistic gardens of early China, progressing on to the gardens of Japan. She relates the development of gardens to the personalities who made them, to the historical background, to Eastern religion and philosophy, to the political events which shaped the culture of each period, to the arts in general and to painting, architecture and the tea ceremony in particular. Above all, her account brings alive a world in which mosses hold the warm promise of spring and hope in their velvet depths; in which the juxtaposition of pools and rocks invite meditation; where sunny slopes convey the calm of centuries and in which flowering cherry trees are viewed by moonlight, with tall lanterns throwing soft light on masses of flowers seen against the starry darkness of the sky. The work includes chapters on Heian gardens, the gardens of the Fujiwara period, the princely gardens of Tokugawa times and Zen landscapes, along with sixty-four pages of illustrations, including many rare photographs. Practical and inspirational, no other work so perfectly captures the spirituality, beauty and complex simplicity of these gardens that link heaven and earth.