Japanese Gardening: The Garden of Suggestion

There was no need to develop further a form that could satisfy all emotional needs. Contact with the West brought no change of temperament. In the early eighteenth century Father Benoit of the Jesuit Mission laid out a portion of the park at the Summer Palace, Yuan Ming Yuan, in the European architectural style, with staircases and baroque fountains and symmetrical plantations, delighting the Chinese with the ingenuity of his water works and the exuberance of his invention. But this garden seems to have been an isolated example; as the Emperor grew old he rarely visited it and after his death it decayed utterly. For the most part the Chinese stopped short of the extreme lengths of development to which the Japanese went. A philosophy of `nothing too much' prevents any principle from being pursued to its logical conclusion. There was no such innate restraining influence upon the Japanese. It is said that Japan had an indigenous style of gardening before the arrival from China of Buddhism in the sixth century. This style, if indeed it ever existed, is known as the Imperial Audience Hall Style, and appears to have consisted of rudimentary natural landscapes in the courtyards before the palaces. The ingredients of this landscape were constant: a lake, an island, a bridge, a plum tree and an orange tree. It is not improbable that there were such gardens, but if so it is likely they, too, were Chinese in origin. The Japanese have rarely been initiators, but it is untrue to esteem them as poor imitators of the Chinese and nothing else. In all arts and sciences they have shown an astonishing receptivity to fresh ideas and a capacity for pursuing them to extremes. The Japanese reduced to a rule the way the Chinese used the ingredients of natural landscape, and by so doing produced something original. There is less humanity and less poetry in the Japanese than in the Chinese garden, but at its best there is more sheer thought and more of a quality one rather hesitantly calls mysticism. By the fifteenth century, the classic period of Japanese gardening, the art had settled into firm channels. Gardens were divided into three principal types, hill gardens, flat gardens, and tea gardens.