Creating a Japanese garden that surpasses empty parody requires an understanding of the design techniques that make the gardens look and feel the way they do. Japanese aesthetics, especially those that have been predominant since the medieval influence of Zen Buddhism and military ethics on social taste, are renown for their rarefaction. In the case of the garden, attaining this aesthetic is a process akin to decanting nature; trickling the totality of the natural world through fine filters that let through only an essential extract.

The filters in question are not made of cheesecloth. They are mental constructs, ways of perceiving. So, for instance, you train your eye to see essential lines; those of a wind-swept pine tree or an ocean coastline and when you make a garden you recall these. As it says in the Sakutei-ki, a gardening manual from eleventh century, "Recalling one's memories of wild nature...create a certain atmosphere (in the garden), reflecting on nature again and again." As you look at nature you gain a sense of mass; of how a boulder sits naturally in a stream or how a mountain rises from the sea. You make a part of you the color scheme of the natural world, its flow from burnt umber through sepia into the myriad greens and up to sky blue Æ punctuated by the rare flash of white, red or yellow. You learn the cadence with which things work, the rhythms of the seasons. This artistic examination of the natural world creates within a designer a private wellspring of images from which all design will flow.

For Japanese gardeners, one result of this distillation process was the development of a limited set of gardening plants, called niwa-ki, which were preferred for one or more of their botanical assets. Among the niwa-ki are Japanese maples, which are easily controlled and offer striking changes through the seasons; pines, also eminently prunable and imbued with a certain noble air; and fine leafed azaleas which can be counted on throughout the year to provide precise forms. The intention of the Japanese garden is clearly not as a place to gather and display prodigious numbers of horticultural species and, in general, the form of a single plant is given preference over the massed effect of many. This same simplicity of palette also holds true for all other materials used in the garden and it can be said that understanding the use of a reductionist palette is essential in order to achieve the sense of quiet reserve that is so appreciated in the Japanese garden.

The elimination of non-essential elements is more than a matter of aesthetics, it is also a technique through which art works are wed to those who view them. Simplified to basic components, art work becomes highly suggestive, initiating ideas but not completing them. In ink paintings, for instance, a mountain path is lost in mist, concealing its final destination. Where the path leads, remains for the viewer to conclude. Haiku, in their brevity, offer only an inkling of a natural scene which the mind of the reader then completes. So it is with the garden. To the degree that it is rarefied it also becomes evocative, at times hiding allegorical meanings that have been intentionally included in the design but more often revealing through the use of various natural materials, the ephemeral boundary between human society and the natural world.

Another derivative of the process of distillation can be seen in the spatial design of the gardens which often feature open spaces punctuated by plantings, landforms, or stones; elements that frame out a void and cause it to be. In Japanese, this is called ma wo toru, the key word being ma, meaning both space and time. The technique of creating a void in space/time by refraining from introducing additional material can be seen in a variety of Japanese arts. In ink paintings it takes the form of great expanses of unpainted white page; in Japanese music, like that of the shakuhachi, the void can be heard distinctly as pregnant pauses lingering between notes; voids can even be perceived in the movements of a Noh performer as they pass through the box-like space of the Noh stage or in the soft light and shadow of traditional Japanese architecture. To achieve this spatial reserve, the key task required of the designer (of the garden or any other of the arts) is something that is far easier said than done. Knowing when to stop.

Even as knowing what to leave out of a design is important, so too is knowing how to balance what is put in. Asymmetry, an off-balance sense of balance, is a design technique used in many aspects of Japanese culture from flower arranging to architecture. Japanese gardens as well are asymmetrically designed, with each element being carefully positioned so that it will not fall on axis with a sight-line, the center of a building, or the immediate end of a path. By doing so, no single element demands exclusive attention by claiming a predominant position in the garden. Also, each element within the garden, as well as groups of several elements, are designed on the basis of the triangle, an inherently stable yet visually dynamic form.

With these very few, basic rules in hand (examine nature as an artist, extract a rarefied palette, simplify as you design, give preference to space, balance asymmetrically) one is well provisioned to begin an expedition in garden making. If you are trying to recreate a Japanese garden in as authentic a manner as possible, these rules will be your trusty guides and conversely, if you do not have an understanding of these basic techniques, you can buy all the lanterns and stepping stones you want and the garden won't end up expressing what you had hoped for. Likewise, if you want to draw ideas from the Japanese garden in order to apply them to gardening in a novel way, siphoning off the essence of these design techniques will be the most likely way to allow yourself freedom in design while maintaining the aesthetic sense of Japanese gardens.