The Tradition of Japanese Garden Designs
Article by Ralph J. Smith
Whether you’re trying to select garden designs or trying out a new landscaping idea, the right garden plants and accessories will set the mood you’re trying to reach. Landscape design styles come and go, but certain century-old garden styles continue to preserve their attraction.Selecting a garden style that is right for you is a matter of choice. If you design your entire garden according to a particular style, but sometimes just a few sensibly elements bring to mind a style. Each style be it Asian, cottage, formal, and others have their own characteristic details such as particular plants, water features, and materials. Various features are so strongly identified with a particular style that they immediately evoke the appropriate mood.Look below at these three lasting and respected garden styles, then incorporate these style elements into your garden design for the look you would like to achieve.Asian GardensIn the Asian tradition, landscape contemplation – in the wild, in a garden, or in a scroll painting serves as a spiritual experience. The Chinese and Japanese by tradition held sacred the space within a garden and deemed the world outside profane. Some Japanese garden designs offer a rustic landscape and contain wet or dry streams and waterfalls, bordered by ferns, moss, and distorted pines.Lake and island style gardens, developed in China, influenced Japanese garden designs. Islands symbolized the home of immortal spirits and consisted of carefully placed earthen mounds or jagged rocks set in an artificial pond. Cottage GardensThe informality of cottage garden designs lends them an energy lacking in most garden schemes, none the less the gardens are neither nor sloppy when the overall design is caringly structured.These gardens express cheerfulness and gusto for individual plants. Cottage gardens began centuries ago as modest, fenced-in pieces of land kept by cottagers who respected treasured wild-collected plant life for its usefulness. Livestock and vegetables, berry bushes, fragrant flowers, and herbs for crafts, cooking, and medicine packed the enclosures.Formal GardensWhile a love of plants or nature inspires cottage and Asian gardens, formal garden designs express the humanistic value of people as the center of the universe. A formal garden design looks it’s utmost near a traditional-style home so the garden embellishes the home’s architecture. Formal garden designs are symmetrical though the main alignment often leads from a specific position near the house (a balcony, front door, a stone terrace) to a focal point further away such as a pavilion, bench or sculpture. By continuing the geometry of the house outdoors, a formal garden layout creates a transition to a wild or informal landscape at the edge of the property. property’s edge.
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