Return to the Originary

A man made this garden of plum trees, maples, pines, bamboo, numerous bonsai, hanging wild orchids, and a pond with koi. Now that he is 97 years old, he no longer spends as much time willing it intentionally; leaving much pruning and tending behind him. Years of living have made the man learnt to let the garden proceed in an unaffected manner, just as he awakens to live with his own nature, unaffectedly. After a while nature takes over. Mists and mountain showers rally the garden on, washing away traces of its cultural allusions, so that tree now becomes tree, plant becomes plant, and fish becomes fish. And the man becomes a man. The garden thus grows to become more truly like him.

What is a Contemporary Garden?

One of the key aesthetic of the Western (now deemed “international”) idea of the garden is the use of plants in a painterly way, making scenes in groupings like a classical Western landscape painting. Think of the typical English garden borders or even the contemporary blended swathes by Piet Oudolf. This somewhat contrasts with the classical Japanese or Chinese hand-scroll tradition of landscape painting, where plants and trees can be individually appreciated, each articulated with ink brushstrokes. They are further spaced apart — the idea of “ma” or the space inbetween things. The composition of branches and shapes leaves can be more deeply appreciated. In the traditional Japanese tea garden, plants with their disposition of branches, rocks, and objects are carefully orchestrated as a series of continuously changing vignettes along the garden path to aesthetically-spiritually prepare the participant before the ceremony.

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For the garden of the Oiso Longhouse, plants will be arranged as individual entities spaced a little apart, amongst sub-architecture: timber frames, screens, pavings, platforms, and seating; the "ten thousand things". With their different characters — shapes and size of leaves, and composition of branches — these relate to each other in different ways. As they grow in size or decay, these relationships will change. Between them, unintended vegetation or “weeds” will be kept or removed, edited as befits our subjective propensity. This is our idea of the contemporary garden for this part of the world.

Henry Miller on Photography

“Among all the objects Brassai has photographed his chair with the wire legs stand out with a majesty that is singular and disquieting. It is a chair of the lowest denomination, a chair which has been sat on by beggars and royalty, by little trot-about whores and by queenly opera divas. It is a chair the municipality rents daily to any and every one who wishes to pay fifty centimes for sitting down in the open air.

The most unostentatious, the most inexpensive, the most ridiculous chair, if a chair can be ridiculous, which could be devised. Brassai chose precisely this insignificant chair and snapping it where he found it, unearthed what there was in it of dignity and veracity. THIS IS A CHAIR. Nothing more. No sentimentalism about the lunatics who fabricated it, no statistics about the hours of sweat and anguish that went into the creation of it, no sarcasm about the era which produced it. no odious comparison with chairs of other days, no humbug about the dreams of the idlers who monopolise it, no scorn for the nakedness of it, no gratitude either. Walking along the path of Jardin des Tuileries one day he saw this chair standing on the edge of a grating. He saw at once chair, grating, tree, the clouds, the sun, the people. He took it as it was, with its honest little holes, its slender wire legs.

On such a fine spring day, there is visible on the stalest object a promise, a hope, a possibility. Nothing is dead, except i nthe imagination. 

Animate or inanimate, all bodies under the sun give expression to their vitality.

And so on that day, in that glorious hour, the homely, inexpensive chair belonging to the municipality of Paris, became the empty throne, which is always beseeching the restless spirit of man to end his fear and longing and proclaim the kingdon of man.”

Henry Miller, The Eye of Paris

Tokyo Snow

 

Hailstones left my plants distraught

 

The Man in the Castle

Roland Barthes wrote that Maupassant often lunched at the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower so as to escape from having to look at it. "It's the only place in Paris, where I don't have to see it." In a typical Japanese castle, one wonders if the rulers while looking at lofty views of their dominion, noticed the irony of not being able to see what they stood on.

 

Respect

Then and now. Getaya-san on Sansakizaka and Yakitoriya-san in Yanaka Ginza. The sort of values becoming extinct in our internet-dominated physical world.