Product Description

Here is a concise introduction to the practical aspects of making a Japanese garden. Whether your garden is a spacious suburban lot, an office countyard, or a tiny inner-city backyard, you will find here hundreds of creative but time-honored ways to make maximum use of the space you have.

You will learn how to lay stones and pathways and how to create intriguing sand patterns like the ones in Zen temple gardens. You will learn about Japanese lanterns, miniature pagodas, water basins, gates, and walls, and will be shown step by step how to make a bamboo lattice fence. Notes on the care of bamboo, moss, and grass are provided as are names of native North American plants and trees that can be substituted for conventional Japanese varieties. Schematic layout plans, detailed how-to explanations, and over 130 color photographs of Japanese gardens old and new give you ideas for endless variations.

Thoroughly up-to-date in its approach and based on the principle that a garden must satisfy the gardener, not a set of inflexible guidelines, this book encourages you to choose freely from the wide range of traditional Japanese design elements that suit your needs and tastes. Whether you live in the country, city, or somewhere in between, you will discover here numerous ways to transform--simply, inexpensively, and with your own two hands--that back porch, corridor, or yard into an intimate, tranquil oasis, one that will reward your planning and work with a rich and everchanging beauty.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51114 in Books
• Published on: 1993-02-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 80 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9784770016614
• Condition: New
• Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

About the Author
Kiyoshi Selke was born in Kyoto in 1918 and holds degrees from the Tokyo Academy of Fine Arts and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. One of postwar Japan's most original and thoughtful residential designers, he was with Masanobu Kudo a chief editor of Sakutei no Jiten (Encyclopedia of Garden Making). He is currently professor emeritus at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Masanobu Kudo was born in Tokyo in 1924 and holds a degree in East Asian history from Kyoto University. He helped found the avant-garde Ohara school of flower arranging and in 1969 became the director of the Japan Ikebana Arts Association. An acknowledged expert on flowers, trees, and plants, he has contributed to numerous publications on flower arranging and Japanese gardens.

David H. Engel, who served as editorial consultant for this volume, is a prominent American landscape architect and site planner. For several years in the 1950s, he studied in Japan under Tansai Sano, the late master landscape architect of Kyoto. Now in practice with an office in New York City, Mr. Engel does both private residential and large scale commercial and public work. His designs include Heian pavilions for the headquarters of the Gulf States Paper Corporation and the Japanese garden on the Rockefeller estate, acknowledged to be the finest in the Western world. A contributor to House Beautiful and The New Yorker, Mr. Engel is also the author of Japanese Gardens for Today and a forthcoming work, China's Gardens: Ancient Roots...Modern Lessons.

Customer Reviews

Begin With a Classic
This slender book packs a big punch. It has been a how-to Japanese gardening classic for many years, and is a fine place to start. Long on good photography, not wordy, but gets right to the design philosophy behind the gardens. Especially well geared for those without a lot of space to work with. I only wish it were bigger! If you find yourself looking for more at this end of this book, may I recommend 'Japanese Gardens: Right Angle and Natural Form' by Gunter Nitschke (1993, Benedikt Taschen) for more on fabulous pictures, history and design theories.

Best Guidebook for Planning Your First Japanese Garden
Not a coffee table glamour book, not a glossed-over editorial toss-off destined for the remainder bin. This is quite simply the best guidebook for the amateur of the Japanese garden who wishes to try out the concepts at home.

It can be very frustrating to take home some fancy book on Zen gardens, only to find that it contains no real help for creating one. This book's real, step-by-step, practical advice is what anyone is after. It does not pretend to be the end-all of the art, & rather it admits this right from the title (A Japanese TOUCH...) This book will get you the right LOOK.

I found especially useful the diagrams of how to get balance (especially through rocks) within a space. There are some very good illustrations of bamboo fencing, too. Botanical suggestions and lists of suppliers are also helpful, but these lists are not exhaustive. You can achieve the basic framework with this book, though. I have yet to find a better Japanese gardening book... room for improvement is in expanding the above lists and adding practical suggestions for more ambitious, larger landscaping. But this will get you the basics.

Bonus delight is the first entry, a mood-setting piece on one man's contemplation of mountains and forests... all to be found in his tiny Japanese garden.

Grab a copy and use it and love your results!

Japanese Touch for your Garden
Using this book and lots of my time I took a boring townhouse courtyard and turned it into a mini Japanese garden of peace and tranquility. My results were so promising I expanded to the front yard and outside the courtyard fence. The book's beautiful pictures and down to earth language gave me the confidence to select and place my plants, rocks, lanterns and install a water basin plus lights for nighttime enjoyment. I'm still using the book's ideas as I build and install a wooden lattice around the garden's perimeter. (This will resemble growing bamboo, which is too large for my space) Yes you can hire someone to do your Japanese garden but why do it and miss all the trial and error that makes creating you own garden so enjoyable. Take this book home and get started. You will not go wrong.