If you have been able to peruse the past three articles in this series, you may agree with me that Japanese garden design is not accomplished with material ingredients alone; by just plunking down five stones and one pine. Rather it requires first a look at the meaning of the gardens themselves as well as a background in the design techniques that make the gardens look and feel the way they do. Even so, with all that known, you may still find your self attracted to stones and pines. So what to do? Well let's take a look at the stories behind a few of the most common materials of Japanese gardens (stones, pines and lanterns) to understand how even stereotypical elements can be used thoughtfully in the garden.

First the ubiquitous stone lantern. Until the late sixteenth century in Japan, the only places lanterns could be found were on the grounds of Buddhist temples, lining pathways leading to temple halls. At that point, some of the early tea masters began to look at lanterns in a new way. Hoping to create a certain mood in their gardens, a feeling that expressed both melancholy and refinement, they turned to using old stone lanterns, admiring their patina of age and sculptural nobility. By bringing these into the garden, they were able to devise the atmosphere they sought. We see two basic things here, first, that lanterns were appreciated for the mood they could evoke, reliant in no small part on the wonderful patina that they attain over a long period of standing exposed to the elements. Stone lanterns will gain this patina over time; cast concrete ones will not. So the first lesson is that lanterns need to be made of materials that will weather beautifully. Next, remember that the tea masters were seeing the lanterns anew, using them at a time when no one else had thought of doing so, a process called mitate or re-seeing. In this we see that it is not necessary to use precise copies of Japanese stone lanterns but rather, following the design spirit of the tea masters, one can reuse old found objects (such as architectural remnants) as garden mood-makers or lighting devices.

Stones encapsulate a multitude of meanings. Now-a-days, for the most part, they are appreciated as sculptural elements, a view that stems from just the past few hundred years. If we paddle further back up the time-stream however we find ourselves in an era when stones were seen as painterly elements, used in the garden like brush strokes on a page. Further back still, is a time when stones were believed to possess geomantic power. Proper placement of stones of a certain size or color in the garden surrounding a residence was believed to bring the flow of life-energy into balance while improper placement would guarantee an ill fate for the household. The first recorded use of a stone in a garden shows it as representative of Mount Sumeru, the central mountain of Buddhist cosmology, in which we see a religious perception of stones. And finally, at a time before gardens even existed in Japan we find stones used as prayer sights, linking the mortal world to that of the gods, something that is still true today to some extent. In all this we see that stones can hold artistic, geomantic, religious or spiritual meanings, and an understanding of those various meanings will greatly enrich their use in garden design.

Pines, for a number of reasons, are symbolic of longevity and as such are considered felicitous in the garden. The distinctive twisted form mimics trees that grow along Japan's rocky coastline. Battered by constant winds, the pines naturally take on the dwarfed, sinuous form that gardeners also create through careful pruning. In fact, it is the black pine that is found along the seashore and so these pines are used in the garden to create ocean scenes while red pines, native to higher regions, are used when creating an image of the mountain. Another interesting symbology applied to pines in the Japanese garden is that the black pine is considered a masculine icon while the red pine is considered feminine. The two species can be told apart by the color of their trunks, as well as the relative stiffness or suppleness of their needles, which combine to produce their respective images. So we see that pines may be appreciated as elegant horticultural sculptures and for the allegorical meaning they express. The salient lesson here though is that the use of pines in the garden (even their characteristic shape) reveals a profound understanding of the trees as they exist naturally on the Japanese archipelago and suggests, as a basis for garden design, the importance of a similar study of nature in your own locality.

The underlying theme of all of the essays in this series has been the importance of cultural context. As such, if you want to understand Japanese gardens, I highly recommend that you begin by listening to Japanese music, contemplating ink paintings, attending a performance of Noh theatre, or even eating a good Japanese meal. Gardens do not exist in a vacuum. They are reliant on other aspects of the culture for their very being and in turn, inform those as well. By seeing the gardens in light shed from other arts and crafts, it is possible to understand them within context, something which has several beneficial results. The first is that if you desire to recreate an authentic Japanese garden in a foreign environment, this background knowledge will serve you well at avoiding the bitter fruits of parody and superficiality. The same can be said for those who wish to use traditional Japanese garden only as a springboard to other things. Likewise, if you are interested in appreciating Japanese gardens as a visitor rather than a designer, this knowledge will still stand you well, giving you the tools to probe beyond surface decoration to the heart of the matter.