Arranging Scenes

To make a world with the walking-looking participant as locus, we began layering the architecture with plants and trees on site.

These were procured from a nearby mountain 15 minutes by car away. There, lies a hamlet of abandoned houses with trees densely grown for the purpose of getting more compensation from a potential developer. Seven years ago, this fabled developer had intended to build a resort but the plan fell through. In the meantime the villagers had all moved to better living conditions down to the larger village-town a few kilometers away, leaving the trees growing naturally, beautifully branched without meddlesome human pruning.

For a few days over several trips we drove up, selected some red and white flowering plum trees, green-stemmed prunes, red maples, Chinese barberries, negotiated the price, and paid a rather professional local team of chain-smoking workers to transplant them back to the site. These men, skin tanned, breaths noisome, bodies listless , surprised everyone with their efficient animal-like movements once they started working, almost as if they were hunting prey. Occasionally prodding branches and making remarks about various trees in the same manner that they would relish how juicy a piece of pork might be. “This one will bear large fruits … ,“ “that one will give you shade … .”

One guest-room courtyard was to be filled with rocks, ferns and moss. This was entirely accomplished by raw manual labour, in an aura of cigarette smoke. Another courtyard accommodated a maple tree that made its way in through the small door only after having some of its limbs amputated.
Rockery thus arranged, trees thus planted, branches with tiny white plum flowers finally free to stretch, naturally bees came.

Equally too, these few days of placing and arranging real trees, real rocks and plants, intoxicated me with a deep happy buzz.

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.