The Oriental Garden
Gardens in the oriental style are to many people the subtlest and most beautiful. Because of its simplicity and informality, this style lends itself to nearly every garden space, including the shadiest. (In fact, shade has traditionally been part of the style.) The thoughtful selection and arrangement of just a few simple materials can transform your large shaded area or tiny nook into a special place for serenity and contemplation.
If you walk into an oriental garden in the United States, you might automatically think of it as Japanese. It might be—or it might be Chinese. The overwhelming likelihood, of course, is that the garden would be American, with an oriental flavor. A true Chinese garden has precise, traditional combinations of rocks, water, and plants. A true Japanese garden has these combinations too, but also an intricacy of arrangement and symbolism that is obscure to most westerners.
The Chinese character representing garden is composed of two words: land and water. Interpret “land” to include plants, rocks, and mountains, “water” to include streams and lakes, and you have the basics of the traditional Chinese garden. The old Taoist concept of a garden was a country retreat among trees in the mountains, with streams and waterfalls. If a garden had to be in town, it should mirror nature. Still, it should have within its walls a stream (if only a dry stream bed of rocks, gravel, and sand); flowers; a carefully planned curving path creating illusions of space and distance and leading to new perspectives; and a mound giving the illusion of a mountain. The illusion could be further refined through the use of rocks on the mound. Rocks themselves came to be used as miniature mountains.
Every Chinese garden, large or small, was intimate. It was laid out so that it showed itself little by little rather than all at once. Pavilion doors and vantage points along the path framed particularly fine views and focused attention on beautiful details. Bending forward to draw water from a drinking basin might suddenly reveal an otherwise hidden wonder, perhaps a splendid rock or a peephole-view to a mountain peak.
The influence of Chinese garden design eventually spread to Korea, then on to Japan, where it was made peculiarly Japanese. The two main types of Japanese styles are “level gardens” and “gardens of artificial mountains.” The “dry” garden is only one form of the first. A more recent development, historically, is the tea garden. It is far less austere than the flat garden, but nevertheless restrained. There are evergreen trees but few flowering plants. The flowers might serve only to mark the seasons. The evergreen trees are often pruned to accentuate their individual characters. The function of the tea garden is to serve as a path to and away from the tea house. Invariably there area stone lantern, a stone basin, and a well. The whole experience of moving through the garden is an exercise in detachment and meditation.
To lovers of gardens and nature, to whom the layers of elaborate symbolism and subtle meanings are perhaps inaccessible, Japanese and Chinese gardens can still be beautiful. Much that is Far Eastern can be adapted to an American garden.
Maybe you have only a dark, rather dank spot where you want a simple garden. If you are fortunate and live in an area where moss forms on the north side of trees and rocks, you might make a garden with a stone lantern (or a concrete facsimile), white river rocks, which will brighten the area and gather moss, a few larger rocks,and a few ferns that thrive in deep shade, such as Adiantum and Polystichum.
Various dwarf ornamental conifers are naturals for a lightly shaded Far Eastern garden. You might work Chamaecyparis species and Cryptomeria species into whatever plan you develop.
Azaleas and camellias are oriental. In traditional Japanese gardens azaleas are used very sparingly for color - in fact, they are often kept sheared and compact, so that there are few if any blossoms, although a fully blossoming plant or cluster of plants may be used as an accent. As long as you don’t use too many colors, you can use azaleas as part of your design without destroying the traditional oriental feeling. You can use camellias too, for larger, bolder-textured effects, although you risk getting away from traditional style here. Remember that both plants like deep, well-drained acid soil, and that they should never be allowed to dry out. Camellia sasanqua makes an especially effective espalier, although C. Japonica and C. Reticulata can also be used.
If you want trees to create shade, consider pines, flowering plums, cherries, crabapples, beeches, the larger Japanese maples, ginkgo, and Magnolia soulangiana.
Among the many plants suited to shaded areas of oriental gardens are Buxus, Liriope, and Ophiopogon.
Whatever combinations you choose, remember oriental restraint and understatement. A japanese maple, a few small evergreens, some tufts of dwarf bamboo, one flowering plant, pebbles, a flat, weathered bench, and a lantern might fill a larger space adequately and beautifully. A tiny pool sunken among rocks and ferns, and beautifully shaped, subtly pruned dwarf Pieris might create a world inside a tiny courtyard.
