Japanese Garden Designs

Why Japanese Garden Designs Are Popular Around The World?

Japanese garden designs have become quite a rage in many parts of the western world. A Japanese garden can be your refuge, a peaceful and calm place to escape to from the fast pace of life in the real world. The completely natural elements that Japanese gardens incorporate are essentially at the core of what Japanese culture believes in. The ideas and inspiration of the Japanese gardens came from China along with the Buddhism.

Everything should be natural to the surroundings. If you are living on a mountainside and want a Japanese garden then your green space should try to mimic the surroundings and every single part of the garden will have plants, rockscapes, and flowering plants very similar to its natural setting.

There are many different types of Japanese garden designs. The Karesansui Garden is a dry landscape garden that makes uses of just sand, stones, rocks, gravel and maybe moss to represent various facets of nature. These are also known as sand gardens. Very little greenery is used in these garden designs. This is an abstract garden that has its roots in Zen Buddhism. These gardens were developed by monks in order to help them meditate. They used symbolic natural elements to represent various facets of nature like raked gravel would represent water, the way its raked will represent still waters, flowing waters or swirling waters. Stones placed artistically represent mountains, hills or even Buddha and his followers. They can represent a battle scene or ancient tale. You can have simple Zen garden on top your desk or huge one in your backyard. These gardens can be small to fit in a corner of your deck or have a big layout covering all your outdoor spaces. They are quite places of meditation and it should be free from debris, weeds and dirt. The sand is raked every day to create new patterns.

Another garden design is called the Chaniwa gardens, which are tea gardens. In Japanese culture tea ceremonies are important aspect of their traditions. These tea ceremonies are held in teahouses that are located in tea gardens. The path leading to the tea gardens are lined with ishi-doro lanterns or stone lanterns. These lanterns are lit up on special occasions. Stone steps will lead up to the teahouse and special water basins are placed in these gardens. The guests purify themselves using this water before entering the teahouses. These are simple and elegant gardens to create as your home garden.

Tsukiyama Gardens are another style, which recreate famous landscapes from Japan and China. These gardens make use of many elements like bridges, pathways, lanterns, trees, flowering trees, stones, ponds, streams and rocks to faithfully recreate a scenery. They artistically block out certain areas and frame some views using shrubs, bushes and plants to create illusion of space. The nearby building is blocked out but a distant mountain is framed which creates the feeling that the mountain is part of the garden. This is highly skilled art form for the Japanese and incorporates several elements of their religion and traditions into it. The rocks, stones are artistically placed to represent mountains and hills of China and lantern placed at a strategic location will highlight certain aspect of the park that the designer wants you to notice like a bridge or water fall or a stream gurgling over rocks. As you suddenly come up on some hidden aspect of the garden your senses are both delighted and soothed by the artistic beauty of gardens.

There are other Japanese garden designs like strolling gardens, pond gardens and home gardens, each  designed to be viewed from different perspective. You can choose whichever design you feel will best suit  your home and its surroundings which are important elements to be taken note of and incorporated