by mountains, the city is wrapped in a hazy mist that promotes luxuriant floral growth and carpets the land in moss, fern, and bamboo grasses. Over mountain passes to the north lies the Sea of Japan, while the plain in the south extends to Osaka and the Inland Sea, and farther on, to the Pacific Ocean.
The high humidity also provides an ideal environment for producing silk with the flexibility needed for spinning and weaving its delicate strands. Silk is no longer produced in Kyoto, but the thousand-year-old tradition of sericulture is revealed in remnants of the mulberry bushes—a vital nutrient for silkworms—that have been unearthed on the plain of Kameoka, west of the city.
Cascading Otonashi Falls in Ohara.
The Hata clan is believed to have brought silk from the Korean Peninsula when it established itself in the 4th century in the western part of what would become Kyoto. The forested basin was rich in game. Deer, bear, serow, wolves, fox, wild boar, hare, and monkeys roamed the land. The sky was dotted with cranes, ducks, egrets, and a variety of migrating birds.
Maple leaves captured by a stream.
The principles of yin/yang at play—garden in Tofuku-ji.
By the 8th century, several capitals had been established, with one of the earliest in the fertile land around Lake Biwa. In 710, the city of Nara, just south of the lake, became the first permanent capital, with an imperial court patterned on China’s. For centuries, the court adhered to the political and social dictates of Confucian cosmology, until gradually, an indigenous system evolved. A new religion, Buddhism, was also imported from China to Japan, along with carpenters to apply their superior building techniques to large temple complexes. The massive construction projects imposed a new shape on the land by forming wall-enclosed courtyards and elaborate structures to house sacred images. The tools and techniques were modified to build private estates for the nobles.
The beginning—rocky isles emerge from the sea.
Gliding on a surface rich with autumn color—Ryoan-ji’s Kyoyochi Pond.
A black pine shaped by generations of skilled gardeners.
By 783, perhaps impelled by Nara’s limited water supply, the capital was moved to Nagaoka, southwest of present-day Kyoto. After only eleven years, inauspicious events forced another relocation. Eventually, the Hata clan allowed the imperial family to hunt on its game-rich lands and to move onto its estate. The establishment in 794 of the new capital, Heian-kyo, sparked an enormous construction boom. It employed building and landscape techniques recently imported from China, while adapting them to Kyoto’s environment and climate.
Tense coils of raked gravel spin perpetually.
Like Nara, Kyoto was designed according to the geomantic dictates of feng shui as a grid of avenues and modeled after the older Chinese city of X’ian. The imperial court lay in the central north, at the apex of an eighty-meter-wide boulevard. The rest of the land was divided into square-shaped cho, within which the aristocracy was allotted land to build its new estates, the dimensions of which have barely changed for a thousand years.
Now, within this context of stability, it was time for the nobles to impose their new culture on their lands. They expressed their wealth, taste, and awe of nature by creating the gardens for which Kyoto is famous today.
Initially, small hillocks and winding streams brought wild plants closer to residences, while ponds enhanced the view from a veranda or a shallow-bottomed boat. Narrow paths traversing the garden gave inhabitants varied views to stimulate their poetic tendencies and provide pleasure in a most secular manner.
Nature complements the gardener’s hand.
Centuries later, with the introduction of Zen Buddhism, temple landscaping was designed to produce a minimum of visual stimulation, so that viewers would have an opportunity to extract and internalize meaning.
Today’s landscape artists still draw from this heritage. And today’s visitors, as well as future generations, are heirs to the invaluable legacy of how respect for the natural environment and the gardener’s art dignify the common and make it extraordinary.
A cascade-smoothed boulder.
CHAPTER 1
Gardens of Central and Eastern Kyoto
At the very heart of Kyoto lies the former Imperial Palace. The emperors and courtiers who lived in the complex were subject not only to the vagaries of politics and intrigue, but to the dangers of fire and war. Each new court brought its own architectural and landscape design elements, but all were consistent with literary and artistic precepts, and most importantly, with the dictates of geomancy and ritual.
From the 6th century onward, geomancy was used to determine auspicious dates: when travelers might move or occasions should be scheduled, and even to decide the layout of a residence and, of course, its garden. The strictures included not only what physical demarcations would reshape and regulate the land, but also abstract superstitious constraints imported from China and Korea.
The divination of all these beliefs was complex and required consulting specialists, which the ritual-obsessed court did assiduously.
As the city took shape, the land was reconfigured to adhere to geomancy-determined rituals and beliefs. The system gave structure to personal lives and conferred a lasting legacy on the shape and spirit of Kyoto.
A flattopped cone of sand at Ginkaku-ji. Visitors to Kennin-ji. Inner gardens flank a corridor in Nanzen-ji. A young pine in the garden of Tenju-an. Waiting for inner stillness.
KYOTO’S OLD IMPERIAL PALACE GARDEN
The city of Kyoto underwent an immense transition in 1868 when the imperial court was moved to Edo, which was renamed Tokyo (eastern capital). Only fifteen years earlier, Commodore Perry’s black ships had opened the country to an array of Western thought and tastes that would infiltrate politics and the arts and spark deep transformations.
The old Imperial Palace and its gardens were not immune to change. The present complex was moved to Kyoto in 1788, but required considerable new construction after fire damage in 1855. Rather than an authentic reconstruction of the original buildings and gardens (better seen at Heian Shrine), the current grounds reflect an accumulation of traditional landscape concepts.
Garden views were an integral part of all but the most humble abodes, and even today, gardens provide highly desirable