Spirit of Tea: The Garden of Suggestion

For example, the eminent tea professor Rikiu favoured a garden which re-created the atmosphere of `the lonely precincts of a secluded mountain shrine, with the red leaves of autumn scattered around'; Enshiu thought that the tea garden should express `the sweet solitude of a landscape in clouded moonlight, with a half-gloom between the trees'; Oguri Sotan favoured `a grassy wilderness in autumn with plenty of wild flowers'; more simply another view was that the tea garden should express a spirit in harmony with the spirit of tea. The spirit of tea is not a concept habitual to the Western mind. However interpreted, it was held to be that of clean honest poverty, but so subtle was the interpretation of this rare spirit that the professors of the craft were able to specify the precise number of nails that should hold the door of the tea-house together and how they should be grouped. The lamp should preferably be one of austere design and was best if it bore the marks of age. The fences, the gates, the frail and simple buildings themselves were all carefully considered and tabulated. Making such a garden must to an experienced designer be much like playing a game of chess; each move opens up only a certain range of possible onward steps. Within the buildings `the rites were celebrated in their due ordinance, with their prescribed compliments, obeisances, and admiring exclamations over the prescribed flower, arranged in the prescribed spot, and indicated by the host in the prescribed words, to be followed by the invariable litany of conversation and courtesy over the cup of tea to be made, handed, accepted, and drunk all with remarks and gestures and smiles of ancestral rubric'? Yet none of this, so apparently strange to Western manners, is at heart very different from, say, the etiquette which prevailed at Louis XIV's Versailles, or the drills of such military ceremonial as Trooping the Colour. In no type of Japanese garden were flowers as important as they now are in the West. Certain flowers were much admired, in particular the plum blossom, the wistaria, and the chrysanthemum. But the effects sought during the classic periods of Japanese gardening were required to be permanent and were not those that flowers could give. Most trees used were evergreens and those that were not were chiefly valued for the form of their trunks and branches rather than for their foliage. Even the azalea bushes were trimmed in order to make the shape the designer required and at the same time to remove the distracting vulgarity of the blossoms.