Humane Beauty, Japanese Style

Water.  Stone.  Plants.  Wood.  With those four simple building blocks, the Japanese create traditional Japanese gardens.  Although using only four basic elements, they create a multitude of beautiful effects.  As they create those gardens (a tradition that dates back a thousand years), they provide what could be a course in the principles of aesthetics.  The gardens also provide what could be considered a lesson in our human relationship to Nature.

A basic principle of beauty -- any kind of beauty -- is that it brings into harmony what might be otherwise experienced as being conflicting.  As you stroll through a Japanese garden, you indeed experience a peace, a harmony, even as your eyes are filled with a variety of contrasting textures and shapes:  Stone path, soft grass.  Trickling water, hard rock.  Carved wood bridge, straight pine tree.  Great overhanging willow tree, a tiny splay of small stones.

The plants, walkways, bridges, pools of water, and occasional benches or buildings are arranged not only to provide a heightened experience of picturesque effects, but also so as to slow you down as you stroll through the garden.  I have had the pleasure of visiting a half-dozen Japanese gardens in the U.S.  I admire what the landscape designers have accomplished, even when the moisture and moss that are a feature in gardens in Japan are not available due to a drier climate.

Besides providing numerous lessons in aesthetics, my experiences in exploring Japanese gardens has led me to musings about our human relationships with Nature.  Certainly, designers of Japanese gardens and the people who frequent them display a love for Nature.  Nevertheless, the effects are clearly contrived, even when they are designed to feel natural.  There is not a weed anywhere (even though the hard-working people who maintain the garden are usually out of sight).  Because of this cultivated character, it seems to me that Japanese gardens can speak only partway to our human relationship with Nature.  They certainly cannot speak to our relationship with wilderness -- which by definition is land not cultivated for human use.  There is little sense of the otherness of Nature, or of its value in its own right, apart from human enjoyment.  Nor is there much of the predatory component within Nature.  (Even the koi fish are like giant pet goldfish, with food dispensers in some gardens so that human visitors can feed them.)

Despite those limitations, I would prefer that Nature be loved in this way than not at all.  Also, it would be wonderful if every U.S. city had a Japanese garden as a place for rest and renewal in the often hard and often stressful urban landscape.

In the final analysis, though, Japanese gardens are not a complete home for humans, but are instead places for us to occasionally visit.  They are a refined home for the cultivated koi.  If I had any doubt about that, it was removed by the sign on one garden's fish-food dispenser by the koi pond.  It read:  "Please don't feed the squirrels or other wildlife."

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Have you ever visited a Japanese garden?  What do you remember about it?