Seattle Japanese Garden pics (dialup users beware)

17 years ago

I was really thrilled and excited to be able to see this kind of master garden design, and even more so when I realized that a year or two ago I would only have been able to say "This is so pretty!" and this year I can appreciate some of the pieces that make up such a work of "artless artifice".

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These are good examples of paths having a reason to curve, yes? In the first, around the curve is a breathtaking view of the "mountain path" over the "mountain stream". In the second, I had to realy look and think to get past my "of course the path would curve around that tree, it's only natural" and start appreciating how the whole thing was deliberately planned that way.

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This was my favorite part of the garden and my favorite picture from the trip. It blows me away how natural every inch of it looks, and how it's all manipulated to unfold like a story and lead the eye. (It's the view I referred to when I was talking about the curving path above.) Those irises must be something else in bloom.

One of the things I noticed particularly on this trip was the way compositions were arranged three-dimensionally. Whenever I envisioned a plant combination before, I thought about it as kind of a flat picture, but the Japanese garden made clear to me how plants can occupy spaces with a varying degree if distance from the viewer and present a scene that flows smoothly but has depth. (This was particularly interesting to me because of its bearing on my qustion earlier of how to screen a porch without a straight row of shrubs.)

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This was an example that really excited me because I could see how the shrubs were arranged around the curve of the path, and in the space far beyond, in layers: magnolia layer, pine layer, pine layer, maple layer, trees in the distance layer as a backdrop. And also, how the layers were arranged to delay a clear view of the lake, co-opting it into a minor element of the picture until it was "time" to reveal it fully. I spent quite a lot of time talking about it to DH, but I'm afraid he didn't get what made it so cool.

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Can anyone ID these pretty woodland flowers? At some point I exclaimed to DH that I had been so wrapped up in the compositions of shrubs and trees that I was forgetting to look down at my feet and see the smaller plants there. Only afterwards, I realized that it wasn't an accident at all. There weren't any small delicate plants by the cherry orchard, for example, or the views out over the lake. The places where care was lavished on small-scale plantings were in the spots where I would naurally look at the ground: by the benches and in the areas where the path was made of stepping stones. There was a total absence of conflict in what I should be looking at at any given point. (Which is not to say there wasn't sensory overload, because there was!)

Kristin

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