They have been part of American horticulture — and culture — for nearly 150 years, yet Japanese gardens remain a mystery for many people.
That doesn't have to be the case. According to Tim Gruner, the garden curator/head of horticulture at Anderson Japanese Gardens in Rockford, Ill., you start with the intent of a Japanese garden: evoking a feeling.
"A Japanese garden seeks to create the emotional response to nature in any space," said Gruner, who oversees one of the country's pre-eminent examples of the aesthetic. "So the feeling you get standing in a place of great natural beauty, the positive emotions and reactions to that, [the question is] how can you create that kind of emotional response to nature in your back yard?"
For some, a garden means a patch of zinnias here, some marigolds there, a couple of rose bushes and a little ground cover. All well and good and pleasing to the eye. The Japanese garden follows the dictates of nature.
That was one of the purposes of the first Japanese gardens in the U.S. They were introduced to the public here in 1876, at the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia. America was becoming more urbanized, and there was a desire to bring nature to people in cities. And the cities liked the gardens for what they projected.
"Industrial cities wanted Japanese gardens as a kind of sign of cultural attainment," said Kendall Brown, president of the board of directors of the North American Japanese Garden Association.
Even in 2014, Japanese gardens are constructed around guidelines and ideas that date back more than a thousand years.
"The Japanese garden is based on natural patterns, rock formations, the way plants grow naturally, the way water moves naturally through a stream valley. The shape of the land," Gruner said. "A Western garden — and this is a gross generalization — is often symmetrical, geometrical, vs. the asymmetrical Japanese garden. Think of classic gardens like Versailles, totally fabricated patterns laid out on a grand scale across an obviously human-controlled environment. A Japanese garden is asymmetrical, natural-plant oriented; some areas evoke the essence of a forest or stream valley or wetland, some evoke the feeling of rolling hills."