Appreciating Gardens

Mr. Hinohara, you specialize in ukiyo-e from the Edo period. I can't quite imagine how the common people living in the nagaya row houses of Edo practiced horticulture, let alone the daimyo.

In Japan, the history of gardens goes back to ancient times. Back then, gardens were for the wealthy and powerful. During the Heian period, a book called the "Sakuteiki," which described how to create gardens, was written. It was about how to build the vast gardens of the nobility.

In the Muromachi period, Zen Buddhism and a new Buddhist culture were introduced from China, leading to the emergence of so-called karesansui (dry landscape) gardens. Then, in the Edo period, two major trends developed.

One was for the wealthy class, namely the vast gardens of the daimyo and court nobles. In Edo, in particular, daimyo residences were located throughout the city. This was especially true of the shimo-yashiki, which served as villas. They created vast, natural gardens with large ponds, and kaiyu-shiki (strolling) gardens were built for people to enjoy walking through.

And the other was for the common people, the townspeople?

That's right. Among the common people, as their economic power gradually increased in the 18th and 19th centuries, the practice of cultivating plants as a form of horticulture expanded rapidly.

In addition to growing plants themselves, the common people also went out to famous spots for cherry blossoms and plum blossoms. For plum blossoms in particular, wealthy townspeople would plant them in their own residences to create gardens, which they would then open to the public. The common people would visit and enjoy them when they were in season.

For the creators, they were of course their own private gardens, but for the common people, they were like public gardens.

Was the famous Kameido Umeyashiki, which Van Gogh also imitated, also a plum garden at the home of a wealthy townsperson?

Yes. Other places where many plants were grown were temples and shrines. Also, famous cherry blossom spots were created by the eighth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune, along the Sumida River, on Gotenyama in Shinagawa, and at Asukayama as recreational areas for the common people. Asukayama is still visited by many cherry blossom viewers today, but it was originally developed by the shogunate.

As one of the pastimes for the common people, they would go flower viewing in such places. Also, wealthy townspeople would create their own gardens, plant plum trees and other seasonal flowers, and open them to the public.

So the townspeople also began to create gardens.

That's right, mainly from the 19th century onward. The Mukōjima-Hyakkaen Gardens, now a Tokyo metropolitan garden, still exists in Sumida Ward, but it was originally created by a townsperson named Sahara Kikuu, along with other cultured individuals, who also enjoyed various literary activities there.

In the early Edo period, it was mainly the wealthy, centered around the daimyo and shogun families, who grew plants in vast gardens. But gradually, even among the wealthy, cultured townspeople, they began to cultivate various plants themselves and to buy and sell them.

There was originally a profession called ueki-ya, or gardener. Initially, their job was to maintain daimyo gardens, receiving work requests from the daimyo families.

To maintain the gardens.

Yes. From those gardeners, sales to the common people gradually expanded.

There were also plants that were popular for a limited time. Morning glories are a typical example. They would grow unusual varieties called "mutant morning glories" and compete with their friends, saying, "I made such an unusual morning glory bloom." They would show them off to each other and hold something like a competition.

Plants like Ardisia crispa and Neofinetia falcata were also resold at high prices, sometimes fetching sums equivalent to hundreds of thousands or even millions of yen in today's money.

The people doing this were relatively well-off samurai and townspeople who had the leisure time to enjoy such pursuits. Depending on the era, there were venues where samurai and townspeople could interact across social classes through various arts, not just horticulture, but also literature, waka poetry, haikai, and painting. Horticulture also had an element of being a cultured hobby.

Separately, there were also people who liked flowers but were not so serious about it, who would buy flowers in pots at plant markets and enjoy them casually. I think the increase in the production of flowerpots was also a major factor.

It seems they also competed over their elaborate pots.

For potted plants, there were different ones for each season. For New Year's, there were potted Adonis ramosa, and in spring, potted Primula sieboldii. Not only could people go to buy them, but plant sellers carrying them on a shoulder pole would walk through the town, making them very easy to buy. Acquiring flowers and plants was an everyday form of entertainment, and actually growing them became an enjoyable pastime.

You mentioned that it became fashionable to grow rare species. Hearing that reminded me of the famous tulip bubble in the Netherlands in the early 17th century.

During the Dutch tulip bubble, everyone, from the rich to the washerwomen, is said to have bought bulbs. Everyone bought tulips like crazy. It's said to have become the basis for financial trading.

I don't think there was such a dramatic social change in Japan, but there were cases of high-priced trading, and it seems the shogunate sometimes banned it.

On the other hand, at the same time, these rare morning glories were also being depicted in paintings, printed, and published.

And that's exactly where they were depicted in ukiyo-e.

Yes. At the time, the technology for woodblock ukiyo-e prints was highly advanced, so they could record these rare plants and preserve them as prints and publications. In the sense that it influenced not only horticulture but also painting and art, I think it was quite influential.

For example, Maruyama Ōkyo has famous paintings that look like extremely precise observations of plants, right?

During the Dutch tulip mania, they were doing similar things. There are paintings that precisely depict not only tulips but also insects, so it feels similar. I wonder if there was also an aspect of scientific curiosity, not just appreciating the flowers.

Speaking of "painted flowers," the history of Japanese painting has long had kachō-ga (flower-and-bird painting) as a major theme. Not just flowers, but also trees like pine and plum, and the birds flying among them, have been depicted in paintings since ancient times, and it was a major theme for artists in the Edo period as well. In that context, the daimyo, in particular, became very interested in what we call natural history and botany.

Natural history, or honzōgaku (pharmacognosy), was about identifying what plants existed in various parts of Japan, what their names were, and determining to what extent they were the same species, even if they had different names in different regions.

It became fashionable among the daimyo in the 18th century to scientifically investigate various things, not just flowers. It was common for them to have artists paint realistic, encyclopedia-like illustrations of flowers, as well as birds and fish.

There's a theory that paintings from Japan influenced English gardens. Until the 17th century, formal gardens influenced by the Renaissance were mainstream in England, but it's said they became more oriental in style due to Japanese influence.

That's right. While researching a topic, I came across an interesting story. An Englishman named Sir William Temple, who was an ambassador in The Hague in the late 17th century, heard stories from people returning from the East with the Dutch East India Company. He left an essay saying, "The gardens in the East are irregular and imperfect. There seems to be a way of thinking that is not the symmetrical, formal gardens of Europe. They call it beautiful. They apparently call this 'sharawadgi.'" This story influenced English gardens, which came to be called 'sharawadgi-style gardens.'

Sir William Temple was the patron of Jonathan Swift, who wrote "Gulliver's Travels." It's generally said that 'sharawadgi' refers to China, but at that time, Qing China was still in a state of isolation, and Japan was the only country the Dutch East India Company traded with. So I wonder if 'the gardens in the East' here actually refers to Japan.

I think Japan may have influenced the English in creating landscape-style gardens that imitate nature, which are different from the symmetrical gardens of the continent.

So it influenced the English landscape garden. What is generally called an 'English garden' I believe refers to the horticultural style of the cottage garden, which was proposed by people like Gertrude Jekyll in a later era as an antithesis to the landscape garden.

The landscape garden is based on the concept of the picturesque, creating an idealized English landscape by, for example, shaping hills. It's more about creating a landscape, like a civil engineering project, than appreciating plants. The designer of the landscape garden, Capability Brown, created gardens on a scale that could move an entire village.

In contrast, Jekyll proposed a garden style that utilized naturalistic planting and native plants. This became widely popular among the bourgeois class from the 19th to the 20th century.

The background of the landscape garden was that during the Baroque period, French artists like Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain began to paint landscapes. The idea of Arcadia as a paradise appears in them. It became fashionable to paint landscapes as utopias, not real scenery, and to depict beautiful goddesses in them. That became the basis, didn't it?

William Kent, who developed the landscape garden, was originally a painter with no experience in garden design.

So, was there an antithesis to the landscape garden, something like, "A real garden is different, isn't it?"

That's right. It's said that Japan has about 3,000 native plant species alone, but England has only about 200. This, in turn, led to a longing for plants, and combined with imperialism, plant hunters collected plants from various countries around the world and increased the number of species through hybridization.

Initially, appreciating plants in England was also a hobby of the royalty and nobility. Many landscape gardens were also the private property of aristocrats. The spread to the citizen class, such as the bourgeoisie, was due to the proposal of the cottage garden style, which involved planting native species in a natural way to enjoy. I think this is what led to the "English garden" that Japanese people admire as "gardening."

You mentioned honzōgaku earlier. In medieval Europe, there was a very strong sense of ethics, and for a long time, it was an era where people felt it wasn't the time for things like admiring flowers and plants. So, you had to have a purpose to grow plants. That's why things like herb gardens were created in monasteries.

In London, there's still a guild of apothecaries, or you could say a doctors' herb garden, in the form of the Chelsea Physic Garden. It's like Japan's Koishikawa Botanical Garden. I think that gardens where plants were grown for a purpose gradually came to be appreciated for their beauty as well.

I think the European perception of plants, or gardens, is fundamentally based on the idea of humans controlling nature. The gardens of the Palace of Versailles are geometrically symmetrical, and even with the English landscape gardens we just discussed, there is a sense of control in that they are creating the landscape themselves.

There's a sense of creating them very artificially, isn't there?

Yes. On the other hand, Japanese gardens, of course, also have an awareness of altering nature. However, while they are altered, I don't think it's about humans controlling nature, but rather a tool for placing humans within nature. For example, even in a karesansui garden, the viewer mentally perceives the grand nature of mountains, the sea, or even the cosmos.

Regarding plants, while the honzōgaku I mentioned earlier certainly had a medical purpose, when you look at the illustrated books created by daimyo, you get the sense that they purely loved flowers and wanted to record them, or loved fish and wanted to have them painted. It feels much more like a world of hobbies than practicality.

In 19th-century England, there was also a strong hobbyist element. But as Ms. Seki said earlier, because there were so few varieties, there was a strong movement to collect rare species from places like Africa and India, crossbreed them, and create new species themselves. This feels different from the Edo period's interest in and appreciation of nature.

Also, London has many large parks, like Hyde Park. Hyde Park was originally Henry VIII's hunting ground, but it seems it was opened to the public and became a park in the 17th century. Although it's called a park, Hyde Park has areas that are like a collection of small gardens.

London's eight Royal Parks were originally royal property opened to the public. London has a very large area of green space among the world's five major cities, and a great deal of it is green space that was once private land opened to the public or shared as common space.

In a broader sense, including pastures and cultivated land, there are public footpaths. These are footpaths (small paths for walking) on vast farmlands that are open to the public as thoroughfares. It can be said to be a system where you can share the scenery by passing through private land.

Also, in a block called Fairhazel Gardens in North London where I once lived, about 50 buildings surrounded one vast garden. That garden was a community garden, and by sharing it, people of various races, classes, and ages could form a community and develop a common consciousness while growing and managing plants. I thought this was a very fair and interesting system.

As Japan moves toward compact cities and urban reorganization, I think vacant lots will continue to increase. How to share that land will become a major issue in the future.

That may be so.

This is just my impression after living in Japan for a year since returning, but I feel that flowers are more a part of daily life in Europe. There's a culture of casually giving flowers as gifts or arranging a small bouquet on the dining table every day. It feels like flowers are close at hand on a common, everyday level. It might be a matter of richness of spirit or having a sense of ease. In Japan, the exteriors of newly built houses are often paved with concrete, with no space even to plant a tree. I wonder how the horticultural culture that developed in the Edo period continues today.

Plant fairs and festivals, like the Iriya Morning Glory Market, still remain in some areas as a horticultural culture continuing from the Edo period, but the practice of having a gardener come to tend one's own garden is rapidly declining, isn't it?

Near my parents' house, there was a home with a magnificent garden. But recently, the elderly person who had the garden built was hospitalized, and their son cleared the entire garden, turning half into a parking lot and building his own house on the other half.

On the other hand, the culture of buying and displaying potted plants seems to remain in the shitamachi (downtown) areas on the east side of Tokyo, across the Sumida River, in places like Koto and Sumida Wards. You see scenes where potted plants are lined up around the entrance, making you wonder where their property line ends.

The potted plants placed in front of the nagaya row houses in the Edo period were, in a sense, very democratic, as everyone passing by could share in their enjoyment.

Just before I moved to the UK, about 20 years ago, English gardens became popular in Japan. I think there was a strong admiration for roses in particular, but Japan's humid climate makes them susceptible to pests, making roses difficult to grow. So, it has changed into a slightly different form.

After that, a movement called the Modern British Movement occurred in the UK. It's a garden style, also known as the Dutch Wave, that primarily uses native perennials suited to the ecosystem. It's a low-maintenance garden that doesn't require annual cutting or transplanting. In contrast to the drift planting of cottage gardens, a style called mass planting, which at first glance looks like a natural meadow, is now becoming mainstream.

If you follow this concept, you can create an "English garden" with original Japanese species without using British plants. This is a garden design method that suits Japan's ecosystem, and I think it's a very natural approach.

Earlier, we talked about how European gardens have more control over nature, but in a sense, I think the designer's intent is also very strong in Japanese gardens.

For example, there are stepping stones. Even with a single stepping stone, the designer controls everything: how people walk and where they are shown the garden. The trees are also intentionally pruned to create specific shapes.

Existing Japanese gardens encapsulate the characteristics of Japanese space. And I feel that the way of thinking about space is as different from the West as this shore is from the other shore.

The use of 'ma' (negative space) is different, isn't it? It's like they leave things out.

That's right. In Japanese gardens, 'ma' is the main character, and the plants are supporting actors. Creating 'ma' might be about creating an atmosphere or a feeling. The plants are supporting actors, and they could just as well be stones. In short, the balance between elements is important, and the relationship, tension, and harmony between objects are expressed in the 'ma.' In contrast, in Western gardens, the elements themselves, like the plants, are the main characters.

For example, with ceramics and lacquerware, Japanese works have a lot of 'ma' or space, but works made for export were intentionally filled in to appeal to foreigners, right?

I experienced this when I was creating gardens in London. When I asked British people to do the construction, they wanted to fill in all the 'ma' (laughs). It seems they feel uneasy if there are gaps. I realized this was a difference in the sense of space.

This concept of 'ma' exists as a Japanese aesthetic sense in all genres. However, it's not done consciously based on a rule like "leave this much space," but is quite intuitive.

Conversely, Japanese people feel unsettled if it's not there.

Even contemporary artists and craftspeople active overseas, who have no conscious intention of creating something Japanese, are often told their work is "very Japanese," and only then do they realize, "Oh, so my way of using and creating space is seen that way."

That happened to me, too. When I first entered a school to study English gardens, I thought I was designing an English garden, but I was told it was very oriental. I was unconsciously balancing things in threes.

I think Japan and China are also very different. When I go to gardens in China, I notice that they tend to fill space, like symmetry, and prefer even numbers. It makes me feel anew the uniqueness of Japan even within the East. It's interesting to think about how the Japanese took culture that came from China and made it Japanese.

That's true for all genres. Ink wash painting is the most typical example. Just as Europeans created Japanese-style things in their imagination without ever seeing Japan, very few Japanese people actually went to China. They only saw what was transmitted from China and imagined it through superficial imitation.

Japanese people who had never seen the large, rocky mountains or great rivers of China would look at paintings and superficially imitate a world that was impossible in Japan, so they had no real grasp of space.

In terms of the concept of space, China is probably closer to the West, isn't it?

Exactly.

I think there's something like a core to Japanese culture, a power to change any foreign culture that comes in, or rather, something universal that doesn't change. I wonder what that is.

To put it simply, they probably can't discard the past. In a sense, in the case of Europe or China, being on a continent, they can flee to another connected land when attacked or dominated. But Japan, you could say, is the final destination for those who have fled, so there's nowhere else to run. I think the history of Japan is one of "We who have fled here have no choice but to get along together in this place."

Where there was originally nature worship like Shinto, when Buddhism was introduced, if this were a continent, I think a cultural shift would have occurred. But since they couldn't move, they had no choice but to merge. With the syncretism of Shinto and Buddhism, gods and buddhas were integrated. Or even with the culture of Zen from China, it was fused with traditional Japanese culture and uniquely modified. You could call it a 'Galapagos' effect, but that's how it's always been.

That's right. Also, Japan is not a chair culture, whereas China is. When I think about why chairs didn't become widespread in Japan, I wonder if it's because they were an agricultural people. Nature is abundant, you can catch fish in the rivers. There's a lot of rain, and plants grow. I wonder if that environment is reflected in their line of sight in various ways.

The line of sight is different when sitting on the floor versus sitting in a chair, so I think this also influences how gardens are made. When you open the shoji screens, you can see the garden beyond the nure-en (open veranda). That's probably a world that doesn't exist in a chair culture. I think things like that also contributed to the creation of Japan's unique gardens and landscapes.

That may certainly be a factor.

Japanese gardens at temples and shrines are, of course, a reflection of Buddhist thought, but I wondered what formed the cultural differences before religion. I consulted various documents and found that in spatial theory, there is the concept of a cosmic axis.

There's the idea of "forest culture and desert culture." Japan is a forest culture, and the West is a desert culture. In the desert, to determine direction, they first discovered the North Star. Since the North Star is a fixed point in the cosmos, they established the line connecting the North Star and the Earth's axis as the cosmic axis, and from there, a fixed worldview was born. In contrast, Japan has a fluid worldview with the east-west axis of the sun's orbit as its cosmic axis, from which animism and polytheistic ideas emerged.

In the West, monotheism was born from this, and in painting, a fixed worldview like single-point perspective emerged. In Japan's case, for example, with the "Rakuchū Rakugai-zu" folding screens, the artist paints while moving their viewpoint. In gardens, too, a style like the strolling garden was born.

The idea of reincarnation, that life circulates and is reborn, this cyclical thinking, is thought to originate in India, but I feel it dominates the Japanese concept of space. The West, on the other hand, seems to worship straight lines and perceives time as linear.

Single-point perspective is precisely the world seen from the eyes of the person painting, and it has a very strong sense of the individual. On the other hand, the traditional Japanese way of painting is not the world seen from human eyes, but is captured from another perspective that looks down on humans from above.

With the "Rakuchū Rakugai-zu," there's a sense of capturing the entire townscape flatly, so I think the world they are seeing, their consciousness of nature, is quite different.

Is that also reflected in ukiyo-e?

In a broad sense, of course it is. It's difficult to depict things realistically just as they are seen by the human eye. There are cases where ukiyo-e incorporated Western painting techniques, but it remained a superficial understanding. They didn't grasp it as a theory and just said, "This is good enough," and finished the painting.

Japanese gardens are highly abstract; they are a reflection of art, or rather, of thought. In contrast, English gardens are gardens to be used, and function is always a consideration.

When I studied English gardens, I was taught something called a bubble diagram, where you fill all the space with functions. In contrast, Japan has 'ma,' a space with no function.

Doesn't the obsession with function relate to desert culture? In short, you can't get water without irrigation. That's why Westerners are so obsessed with fountains; the Hanging Gardens of Babylon had fountains, and the gardens of Tivoli have fountains.

Originally, humans grew plants to eat, and over a long period, the aspect of "gardens for appreciation" emerged. I think the functional aspect is a manifestation of such stark environmental differences. Japan is truly a country rich in nature.

That's right. In terms of garden function, the Edo-period playwright Takizawa Bakin is quite interesting. According to his diary, he did a fair amount of gardening, though on the scale of an ordinary single-family home.

One of the elements at that time was kasōgaku, a form of geomancy. It's like modern-day feng shui. If someone in the family got sick, they might fill in a pond because the water was bad, or they wouldn't plant certain trees in certain places or directions. But while you could call that a function, it's a feeling closer to faith or superstition, isn't it?

I think the current popularity of gardening, even in an era of declining birthrates, is one manifestation of the desire to nurture something.

I think the English word "gardening" carries a strong sense of morality. This might be related to Christianity, but the gist is that "people who grow plants are good people. They are virtuous, the salt of the earth."

For example, this is reflected in literature. In "The Lord of the Rings," the protagonist is Frodo, but the one who helps the despairing Frodo to the very end is a gardener. The final scene is him returning to his own garden and saying, "Well, I'm back in my own garden now." I saw the English sense of ethics and their relationship with gardens in that.

I see.

I think a sense of ethics becomes necessary precisely because it's so difficult to grow plants in a place like England.

The common people of Edo didn't have that kind of ethical sense; in a way, they grew flowers with an innocence. I feel this is because Japan is rich in nature and has many varieties of flowers and plants.

After returning to Japan last year, I was struck by the vigorous growth of plants. Apparently, only 30% of the inhabited areas on Earth are regions that would return to forest if left alone, and Japan is one of them. I was enjoying the ferocity of nature by neglecting my home garden (laughs).

It's true that in Japan, even in the Edo period, you get the sense that people bought potted plants with the same casualness as buying general goods. It must be different from the difficulty of growing things in England.

The Netherlands still actively exports flowers, but the winters are very cold. That's why their feelings about the arrival of spring and the blooming of flowers are more profound than those of the Japanese. I think that's why flowers developed as an important export industry. Japan has so many varieties, but I don't think there's the same level of emotional investment.

In terms of horticultural varieties available on the market, the British market is richer. Garden centers have an abundance of plants, and ordinary people can buy trees and so on. Horticulture and landscaping have become a dynamic industry. Japan has many native plant species, but I think the horticultural market is not very developed.

One type of garden currently popular in the UK is the edible garden. There are also gardens linked to food, like vegetable gardens.

Also, since the war, the UK has had a custom of allotment gardens (community farms), where people cultivate vegetables in fields surrounded by housing, and communities are born there. In a multinational society, they function as a place for people to interact.

Japan has also revised its immigration laws, and I think the number of foreigners will increase in the future, and the aging of society will also progress. This is a piece of wisdom from the multinational society of London: connecting people through allotment gardens and community gardens. I think it's a wonderful thing to have a space where various people can interact in a fair way while engaging with plants.

Real estate is very expensive in Hong Kong, but last year, a vegetable garden was created on the rooftop of a large building that's a combination of a fashion building and an office building. Employees working for the tenants can now cultivate a part of it and grow things like carrots.

Everyone lives in small homes, so they can't have their own gardens. But being able to go to work and, for example, have a boss and subordinate communicate by growing plants together strengthens the building's brand. It would be nice if Japan could do something similar.

In Tokyo, I think roof gardens are the only remaining frontier. I've worked on a few roof gardens myself, and the technology, such as lightweight soil, has advanced considerably, so I believe the possibilities for roof gardens will continue to expand.

In the large new buildings and department stores, even if they're not quite gardens, more places are planting a few plants on the upper floors. I think Ginza Six and Tokyo Midtown Hibiya are examples of this.

Also, recently in Japan, more edible garden-like spaces are being created next to restaurants and such. Perhaps this is an era that is seeking new ways to engage with plants, including through knowing what we eat.