The
Art
of
Setting
Stones
& Other Writings from
the Japanese Garden

A New Book
by Marc Peter Keane

Essays for the philosophical
gardener (or the gardening
philosopher) that reveal the beauty
and meaning of traditional Japanese
gardens.

Stone Bridge Press

"North of Kyoto, low mountains extend in ranks that continue uninterrupted to the sea. Except for narrow strips of open flatland in the valleys, cleared sometime in the distant past for rice fields and hamlets, the mountains are covered by thick coniferous forests and in places an older, primordial vegetation. The passing wind filters down through the leafy canopy and there, amid endless shadows, it moistens and cools, grows heavy, and begins to flow ever so slowly down the mountainsides toward the valleys below, slipping gently through scattered bracken and piles of fallen branches edged with moss.
At the base of one of those mountains, lying in the path of such a cooling breeze, is a small walled garden. The breeze enters, carrying in the scent of the forest and at times a fine mist that makes its flow perceptible - just barely and for a brief moment. Then the mist dissolves and only the trembling of slender bamboo leaves reveals the currents in the air. Nearing the house, the air slows and meanders in random spirals, pooling above the moss, among the trunks of the garden trees. In cycles it gusts, subsides, then grows stronger again, and though the rhythm of these subtle surges is neither uniform nor constant, somehow they suggest a quiet breathing."

"I have been sitting in this old temple for over an hour, looking out at the garden from a room that is a model of planar geometry expressed in subtle shades of sepia: clay-plastered walls sectioned neatly by posts and beams, modular tatami mats, and grid-patterned paper doors. In contrast, the garden is a verdant transcendence of mathematics. It's early spring; the world seems to tremble, everything emergent, being born anew. The camellias off to the side of the garden are full blown, dropping not petal by petal but in their entirety, clumping like clotted blood around the base of the trees.
In the garden there is a pond, neatly tucked between the temple and the hillside beyond. It reminds me of a pearl of water caught in the hollow of a lotus leaf, glistening like liquid mercury - pure as the soul of Buddha. A dense forest encompasses the rear of the pond, hiding it in shadow, but off to the right the trees become more sparse, giving way to a moss-covered yard in which stands an old prayer hall, weathered and noble. The trees in the yard, with more space between them than those in the forest, have filled out majestically and carry their crowns high above the moss. From where I sit, inside the temple hall, the vertical lines of the posts along the veranda echo the straight, brown, cedar trunks in the yard beyond. Two forests: one live, one lumbered."

"This country house is old. The wood of the open corridor that runs along the outside is weathered deeply, its grain as pronounced as the lines raked in the sand of the garden. On the edge of the corridor, just by the base of one of the posts that holds up the eaves, is an emerald green grasshopper, brilliant against the deep umber of the wood. I watch it and wonder if it, too, has a locust within? It twitches, flexes its wings, lies still for a while, then jumps and clatters into the garden.
The garden is a simple rectangle of coarse, white sand, now mellowed by the afternoon sun. Unlike the borderless pond garden I wrote of before that dissolved seamlessly into the forest, this garden is entirely enclosed. On three sides are wooden buildings and on the fourth, the side opposite of where I sit, is a low wall of charred wooden boards. The sand is luminous, the wall matte-black, like the scrim hung at the rear of a stage to lend it depth. Just chest high, it abuts one of the buildings that enclose the garden on the left side, but to the right, it disappears into a jumble of vines that have worked their way up and over from outside. One delicate young shoot probes far out across the face of the wall, tracing a zigzag path, heart-shaped leaves extending left, then right, then left again: light green stepping stones crossing a scorched field.
Outside the wall, the land drops off steeply into a deep valley, rising again far off in a series of ever higher mountain ranges, but from the veranda where I sit, the wall conceals the middle ground—the valley and lower hills—leaving only garden, wall, and mountains in view, layered against one another like a misty Sung ink landscape. Unlike the mountain where the uguisu lives, which embraces temple and pond and gentles them in its shadow, the landscape here expands in sweeping gestures of light and space. Only the wall gives form to the garden."

"I woke this morning to the dry sound of wind rustling through bamboo in the garden; a tiny bell hung beneath the eaves was tinkling quietly. I got up and got out, urged eastward by the breeze and a memory, following them to the backstreets that trace the base of the mountains, twisting with each fold in the landscape. The sounds and scents of the city—a dull whine of traffic, fish grilling - grew fainter as I walked, and the clamor of the avenues turned quietly into an old neighborhood. High above, summer clouds moved in a slow procession east toward the hills and over to Lake Biwa, gliding smoothly as if on plate glass, their shadows chasing after them across the landscape.
Following the clouds, I neared the foothills where the streets narrow sharply, bordered on both sides by stone walls. Although the walls are low, at most no higher than my knee, each is topped by a neatly clipped hedge, a wooden fence, or an occasional earthen wall softened by time, completing an enclosure of green and sepia that shelters the lanes, making them worlds unto themselves. Behind the walls and hedges are garden trees and tiled roofs of old wooden houses, and behind them, occasionally, a glimpse to the nearby mountains where the leaves flicker green and white, nuzzled by passing breezes. The sun was warm and the sheltered lane a pleasant place to be. Something in the air and light reminded me of the first time I came to that lane and discovered what I have come back to find today."

"Last night it was too hot to sleep; I lay awake, looking through an open window at lightning in the sky sparking silently cloud to cloud, illumining wild, feral shapes. The light reflected off the face of my wristwatch lying near me on the tatami. With each flash, a fragmentary image of lighted clouds appeared momentarily on the crystal, then darkened, replaced by four precise phosphorescent dots marking the major hours, like points on a compass. FLASH! For a moment the lens went berserk - the electric chaos of thunderheads alive in the lens - then suddenly it was orderly again; a glowing second hand sweeping rational circles through time.
This morning, I rest in a temple garden, cool beneath an old wisteria arbor. Last night's sticky warmth falters, hesitant before a heavy blackness that gathers over the mountains to the north. The air cools and stirs, its pressure falling headlong; I can feel it in my joints. Above me, the leaves of the wisteria ripple in the breeze, flickering in waves across the arbor, off the edges, down between me and the temple pond in wind-tossed veils. The fluttering leaves seem to flow, but go nowhere. Like a mechanized image of a waterfall I once saw in a coffee shop, they cascade in place, fall, yet never reach the ground. The long, sweet-smelling panicles of flowers that hung in the arbor this spring have passed, leaving only their wiry stems, each studded with tiny nodules where petals were attached. The stems wave in the breeze the way willow branches do, supplely, whiplike. The dark clouds on the horizon gather in masses, but they are still distant; the sky just above is bright blue. The garden, its lotus pond blown with pink blossoms, swims in light."

"In the west of Kyoto, forests of bamboo stretch for miles across the hills and lowlands. Much of it is wild but some parts are tended as farms, neatly culled and cared for. This morning, on my way to a temple that has a simple rock garden, I rode down a narrow street that passed through one of the farms. Unlike forests of wild bamboo that become impenetrable mazes of standing and fallen culms, these farms are pristine. The land is terraced to make work easier and spread with a brick-red mountain soil for the iron it contains. The terraces continue for acre after acre, covered entirely with neatly spaced pale-green bamboo, repeating into the distance to the point where they blur, thousands upon thousands of clean vertical strokes. The forest was shot through with slim beams of angled light, illuminating a morning mist that lingered in the hollows. Something moved among them and I stopped to look.
Looking over a rough fence made of bundled bamboo branches, I saw an older man in loose gray clothes doing tai chi in a small clearing within the forest. He stood, by chance, just on the edge of a pool of soft light cast down amid endless half-shadow. His torso moved slowly, arms cutting gracefully through the air; inhaling, exhaling; pushing away, then drawing in; rising only to fall; circling endlessly, always in motion yet also in balance. It was a dance but not a performance; the movements were not intended to be seen but rather to be experienced by the dancer himself. Swaying back and forth slowly as if submerged in water, his face and chest slipped in and out of the shadows, alternately bathed in light, then absorbed into the dark background, at times revealed then hidden, appearing slowly again. I watched for a few minutes, increasingly caught up in his rhythms, mesmerized as by waves at the shore."

"The sun is slow to show today. slender grasses along the garden path remain fringed with frost, showing russet, tan, and burgundy beneath a delicate lace white. Beneath them, pale-yellow ginkgo leaves lie scattered by the hundreds with more in drifts by the house, blown off the tree and under the eaves by last night's wind. A large stone waits slightly tilted by the path that leads behind the house. At the end of the path, amid piles of tools, three gardeners huddle over an old iron can: an elder man, thin and wiry, his gray hair clipped tight, and two young assistants, fuller and taller than he. Small puffs of breath whiten in the chill air as I walk over to where they are. I pat the stone affectionately in passing.
Gardeners have their rituals, like breaks for tea at ten and three, and on chill mornings a fire always precedes the beginning of work. As I enter the circle, white smoke rises from a small pile of twigs in the can, flames lick through the wood, crackling. The warm glow bathes outstretched hands, flickers across faces. We shuffle and clap, sip tea from thermoses, talk eagerly about nothing. One of the young men picks up a handful of loose twigs, snaps them in two. Some spicebush must have been mixed among them - a sudden sweet scent hinting of cinnamon mixes with the woody smoke."

"Things are not as they seem. the deeper one looks, the less so.
I've come to stay for a week at Yukio's place, house-sitting while he's away. For the past few days, most of my time has been spent in the garden: sweeping and pruning, sketching . . . looking deeper. In the evenings I watch the garden by moonlight, enthralled. Yesterday it began snowing heavily, and only in the last few hours has the storm begun to taper off. Tonight, the old house is dark, except for one room in which I've set some candles. They flicker in drafts and cast a restless pale light across the tatami and tan clay walls. The faltering light plays tricks with a carved Buddha that sits in the tokonoma. At times it seems perfectly serene and then, briefly, to be smiling. The room, too, seems to shift and bend with the vagaries of the light, contracting when the candle flares, expanding into darkness as it wanes. The candles flutter, sending pulses through the room; moods wash across the Buddha's face like surf on sand. What seemed so solid a few hours ago, sculpture and architecture, becomes now fluid, its reality not as fixed at night as it was by day."