17 Aug Designing My Japanese Garden

This is about the initial design of my Japanese garden

Garden Type

Hermitage Japanese Garden – Retreat (Hermitage Japanese Garden)

Originating from the Tokugawa era, hermitage gardens are small gardens that were once built by Samurais or government officials who wanted to retire from public life and devote themselves to study or meditation. They are usually near rustic houses that one approaches walking a long path that suggests entering a forest or forest.
They can have a small lake and other elements of traditional Japanese gardens, but on a smaller scale, sometimes miniature, purposely designed to create a calm and inspiring environment.

These gardens usually combine elements of the strolling garden – Strolling gardens – Kaiyū-shiki-teien 回遊式庭園-, the dry landscape garden – Karesansui- 枯山水 – and the tea garden – Roji 露地- within a restricted domestic scale. The so-called borrowed scenery – Borrowed scenery – shakkei – 借景- can also play a dominant role in the design.

It is a peculiar type of garden, whose design can be unusually complicated, occupying much of the available land with sophisticated paths and narrow paths with various angles and curves. The purpose of this approach is to ensure that the visitor is in the right mood of calm and meditation when they finally arrive at the garden. While the tea garden prepares the guests for the tea ceremony, the hermitage garden aims to create an illusion of space through the re-enactment of a journey and induce a stillness in the visitor in preparation for meditation.

It seems to me that this is the style of Japanese garden that best fits the design of my garden since, as you will see in the description and pages of this Blog, it combines various styles and elements present in different types of Japanese gardens.

References:
http://www.japanesegardensonline.com/The-Hermitage-Garden/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_garden