Mediterranean Garden Society
Mediterranean Garden Society
Reflections on Zen and the art of the Mediterranean garden
by Nigel McGilchrist
photos by Nigel McGilchrist
Photographs to illustrate the article published in The Mediterranean Garden No. 119, January 2025
The photo at the top of this page shows House and garden of Lafcadio Hearn in Matsue (photo Nigel McGilchrist)
The first gift to be sent by the Emperor of China to the Emperor of Japan, in the year 607 when diplomatic relations officially opened between their two countries, was a large rock. This was not a covert insult; nor was it just any ordinary piece of stone that was despatched, but rather an impressive piece of naturally shaped granite, untouched by human intervention, and intended specifically as the ‘foundation’ for a garden. The nature of the gift makes greater sense when we recall that in the Sakuteiki – Japan’s 11th-century classic text on the art of horticulture – the expression used for garden-design (ishi o tateru koto) translates literally as “the setting-up of stones”.
Tenryu-ji
One of the most important differences between the tradition of European gardens and those of China, Korea and Japan is the predominance given in the latter to the skeleton of stones, and their sensitive and intelligent placing. Rocks come first – together with water, if there is to be a pond or lake – but always before the trees and plants. The rocks (which sometimes required months or even years of sourcing) evoke the permanence of nature, in contrast to the trees, which add a poignant transience with their fugitive blossoms and leaves. Rocks could also become the mountains in that landscape-in-miniature which every Japanese garden aspired to be. And sometimes they were not just mountains alone, but the shapes and striations they possessed became metaphors for the waterfalls seen in real mountain landscapes. The oriental garden was not just a place of plants, but rather the physical incarnation of a landscape-painting of mountains, oceans, mists and clouds. It might even allude to images from a famous poem. It was a way of conceiving of a garden that was quite different from the manner in which we view gardens in the West.
Nanzen-ji
No reader of this journal who has spent the last year tending a garden in the Mediterranean can have been unmindful of what the future holds, of how our living plants will cope and survive in increasingly long and increasingly hot and dry summers. These have pushed trees and shrubs – even those judiciously watered – to the limits of their endurance. So what does the future hold for the Mediterranean garden lover?
The movement towards ‘waterwise’, or ‘dry’, gardening has evolved in the face of this new climatic reality; but dry gardening tends to mean one thing in the West, and another in the East. In the 11th-century Heian period – the golden age of early Japanese garden design and the era when the Sakuteiki was written– gardens were often built around ponds or lakes, which functioned as the metaphorical ocean of the landscape-in-miniature. They also had running streams and waterfalls, and were in every sense ‘wet’ gardens. Most of these great, early creations have perished, however, and what has survived instead has become, to Western eyes, synonymous with one important aspect of the Japanese art of horticulture – namely the dry garden of rocks and sand, adorned perhaps by just a few choice trees and beautifully shaped shrubs.
Tofuku-ji
These dry gardens were like essays in natural architecture (something quite different from their Chinese predecessors, with their carefully chosen features and viewpoints), and they emerged in Japan very rapidly in the late 15th century, for two quite different reasons.
First, the 15th century in Japan was a period in which the practice and teaching of Zen was gaining dominance amongst the variety of Buddhist disciplines. Zen’s encouragement of silent contemplation (zazen) and of the emptying of the mind went hand in hand with the concept of a garden as a natural space whose spirit was receptive more than assertive, and which celebrated (negative) emptiness just as much as the (positive) individual elements within its space. At the same time, the garden became an almost seamless extension of the sparse and airy interiors of monastic buildings, with their floors of tatami and their absence of furniture. It functioned like a bridge to the wider natural landscape beyond. It was the shoreline between outside and inside.
Another view of Tofuku-ji
The second reason was a more practical one. The beauty of the historic gardens of Japan makes it hard for us to imagine that many of them were laid out, and nurtured into maturity, against a backdrop of almost incessant destruction and fighting between Buddhist factions or powerful families, interspersed with famines and plagues. This seemingly endless strife culminated in the Ōnin War, a decade of open civil war in Japan between 1467 and 1477, during which the Imperial capital of Kyoto was repeatedly burnt, and many of the magnificent wooden villas, and great Zen temples, such as Saiho-ji and Ryoan-ji, with their garlands of gardens in the city’s surrounding hills, were destroyed. All that survived of the gardens were their rocks.
Ryoan-ji dry garden (partial view)
In the aftermath of this civil war, these rocks – now charred by fire which gave them new and even more suggestive markings – acquired heroic significance: many were re-purposed and moved in order to create new gardens around them, inspired by these salvaged relicts.
Obviously, a garden with fine trees takes decades to create: so who would sensibly invest that time in an age of such instability? Reflecting the growing appeal of Zen teaching therefore, the creation of a simple and concise garden, that was swift to bring into being and yet durable in the face of adversity, had many advantages. And so the fashion for the intimate, small-scale, dry garden was born – minimal, contained, and virtually indestructible.
Shigemori at Tofuku-ji Hojo
Such gardens – depending on how you looked at them – were wonderfully adaptable to the human mind. They could express in their expanses of sand that emptying of the mind aspired to in Zen practice, while at the same time giving a wealth of symbolic meaning through the shapes of the rocks and their relation to one another within the unifying ‘ocean’ of the fine gravel. Famous poems, great paintings or spiritual lands of the after-life could be referenced in them. To some, the characterful rocks (which were often given quite specific names) are islands in the sea; to others they are mountain peaks rising above the clouds; while to yet others they are merely objects of mass, against which we sense the depth and stillness of the empty spaces in between. The landscape painting is always there in the suggestiveness of the design: there are mountains and forests, but also the crucial blank spaces, so typical of Japanese painting, expressed in the garden by the areas of empty gravel or sand. The result of this aesthetic fertility has been the creation of some of the most exquisite outdoor spaces of horticultural history.
Shisendo
The Mediterranean is not Japan, and to create such Zen-style gardens here would be, in many respects, out of place. But we are living in a time both of vanishing water resources and of a growing psychological need for spaces of quiet, refuge and contemplation – for corners of stillness in our increasingly hectic world. In the gardens we create in the West, we do not need necessarily to seek the ascetic minimalism of the Zen garden, but only to understand the two or three lessons that such gardens can teach us. First, that when it comes to planting in a hot and dry climate, less is often more. Second, that whatever is green becomes enhanced when framed between the impenetrable solidity of large rocks and the pale, relieving emptiness of areas of sand. Third, that we should never fear emptiness, so long as it is well balanced with density.
The Mediterranean area has a maquis of enormous diversity, with dense, evergreen shrubs and richly-scented flowering herbs, ideal for combination with a vigorous structure of stones and rocks. It has also many resistant, medium-height shrubs – such as the arbutus and lentisk – of great versatility and compact volume. It has trees that can give an elegant geometric form to the garden to complement the rocks – the straight accents of the architectural cypress and the twisting, sculptured growth of the pine. It has drought-resistant almond trees to give snow-like blossom, and carob trees to provide dense shade. Lastly (and greatest of all), it has the olive, with its incomparable delicacy of colour, volume and movement – a tree quite unknown to the Japanese garden designers of old. By selecting just a few of the above, and spacing them judiciously together with rocks, a climate-resistant garden of great elegance can soon be brought into being.
The Adachi Foundation Garden (20th Century), in Tottori Prefecture
We began this piece by talking about stones and their profound significance for the Japanese imagination. Shunmyō Masuno – perhaps the best-known of contemporary Japanese garden-designers – commented: “I think the most important thing in executing the design of a garden is to talk to the plants and stones, and to hear what they themselves have to say about how they wish to be laid out.” Masuno is a Zen monk, and this might explain the rather unusual advice he imparts to the gardener. But elsewhere in his 350-page manual on creating gardens outside of Japan he describes how difficult he found it to source elegant stones for gardens in foreign countries. He recounts futile field trips to quarries where there are only cracked and broken stones. I suspect he had not tried searching in Greece, however: the wealth, variety and beauty of purely natural rocks, in the Aegean area alone, is hard to beat anywhere in the world.
All this is to say that, in the Mediterranean, we have the fundamental elements for dry-garden design, both in our native rocks as well as in the region’s abundance of drought-resistant plants and shrubs. It is a question of intelligent choosing. Once we recall those Zen-Japanese principles that we should always see our plants as set in the midst of a wider, balanced dialogue between a stable architecture of natural rocks and deliberate open spaces, we have the model for a type of garden which will demand far less of our vanishing resources of rain, fresh water, and time. The fine gardens being created by Jennifer Gay in Greece and the Aegean islands are good examples of this wisdom. In their peace, balance and spaciousness they seem unconsciously informed by Zen principles.
House and garden of Lafcadio Hearn in Matsue
In a delightful and wistful article written for the Atlantic Monthly in June 1892, Lafcadio Hearn, the half-Greek, half-Irish writer and wanderer, who settled, married, and lived the last fourteen years of his life in a small, samurai house in the town of Matsue in the West of Honshu Island, writes beautifully about the tranquillity evoked by the design and planting of the simple garden which surrounded his dwelling. Always proudly faithful to his Greek origins, he understood instinctively the spirit-life of rocks and plants in his garden alluded to in the Oriental imagination, and he likens it to the cult of dryads in Greek antiquity. The art “that made the beauty of this place”, he says, “was the art, also, of that faith to which belongs the all-consoling text, Verily, even plants and trees, rocks and stones, all shall enter into Nirvana.” Perhaps we too can help in this process, as our climate changes: less planting in quantity, and more attention to the beauty inherent in the dry structure which remains impervious to heat and drought. The plants and trees we then choose to place thoughtfully within that structure will be happier: and they in turn will give us greater happiness.
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