Paris

It's summertime, and we spend a lot of time outdoors. How better to spend that time, but in a beautiful garden. This article appears in the NY Times. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article, which includes a slide show.

Hidden Gardens of Paris

By ELAINE SCIOLINO

NEXT to the Palais de la Découverte, just off the Champs-Élysées, is a flight-of-fancy sculpture of the 19th-century poet Alfred de Musset daydreaming about his former lovers. As art goes, the expanse of white marble is pretty mediocre, and its sculptor, Alphonse de Moncel, little-remembered. For me, however, it is a crucial marker. To its right is a path with broken stone steps that lead down into one of my favorite places in Paris, a tiny stage-set called Jardin de la Vallée Suisse.

Part of the Champs-Élysées’ gardens, this “Swiss Valley” was built from scratch in the late 19th century by the park designer Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand. It is a lovely illusion, where nothing is quite what it appears at first sight. The rocks that form the pond and waterfall are sculptured from cement; so is the “wooden” footbridge. But the space — 1.7 acres of semitamed wilderness in one of the most urban swaths of Paris — has lured me, over and over again. My only companions are the occasional dog walker and the police woman making her rounds.

On a park bench there, I am enveloped by evergreens, maples, bamboo, lilacs and ivy. There are lemon trees; a Mexican orange; a bush called a wavyleaf silktassel, with drooping flowers, that belongs in an Art Nouveau painting; and another whose leaves smell of caramel in the fall. A 100-year-old weeping beech shades a pond whose waterfall pushes away the noise of the streets above. The pond, fed by the Seine, can turn murky, but the slow-moving carp don’t seem to mind, nor does the otter that surfaces from time to time.

The Swiss Valley is one of the most unusual of Paris’s more than 400 gardens and parks, woods and squares. Much grander showcases include wooded spaces like the Bois de Vincennes on the east of the city and the Bois de Boulogne on the west, and celebrations of symmetry in the heart of Paris like the Tuileries and the Luxembourg.

But I prefer the squares and parks in quiet corners and out-of-the-way neighborhoods. Many are the legacy of former President Jacques Chirac. In the 18 years he served as mayor of Paris, he put his personal stamp on his city by painting its hidden corners green.

“He took some of the pathetic, shabby squares and gardens and transformed and adorned them,” said Claude Bureau, one of the city’s great garden historians who was chief gardener of the Jardin des Plantes for more than two decades. “He appreciated beauty — of women, of nature.”

Paris’s current mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, has taken over the task. In his seven years in the job, he has created 79 acres of what City Hall calls “new green spaces.” Just this month, he transformed the open space in front of City Hall into an “ephemeral garden,” a nearly 31,000-square-foot temporary installation of 6,000 plants and trees, and even a mini-lake.

Intimate, lightly trafficked and often quirky, the small gardens of Paris can be ideal places to rest and to read. The trick is to find them. You can consult “Paris: 100 Jardins Insolites” (“Paris: 100 Unusual Gardens”), a guide by Martine Dumond whose color photos make discovery for the non-French speaker a pleasure, or explore various Web sites like www.paris-walking-tours.com/parisgardens.html. Or you can simply wander on foot, confident that around the next corner there will be something new.

You’ll find spaces for listening to a concert or watching a puppet show (like the Parc de Bagatelle in the 16th Arrondissement); church gardens (like the one enclosing the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Seventh Arrondissement); gardens with vegetable patches (like the Jardin Catherine-Labouré in the Seventh Arrondissement); oriental gardens (like the one at Unesco headquarters in the Seventh Arrondissement that was a gift of the Japanese government). There are gardens with beehives, bird preserves, out-of-fashion roses, chessboards, playgrounds, menageries, panoramic views, even a rain forest and a farm. Green spaces adjoin cemeteries, embassies, movie theaters and hotels.

Even hospitals.

I doubt that most visitors to Notre-Dame Cathedral know that inside the nearby Hôtel-Dieu complex, which is still a working hospital, is a formal garden-courtyard with sculptured 30-year-old boxwoods. The hospital’s gardener replants much of the space every May — with fuchsias, sage, impatiens and Indian roses.

From the top of the flight of steps that cuts across the garden, you can find yourself all alone, looking out through the hospital’s windows to the tourist hordes outside. Every few months, the hospital’s interns choose a different costume for the male statue at the back — at the moment, he is Snow White.

(It was Mr. Bureau who told me that some of the most peaceful gardens belong to hospitals. Gardens help cure patients more quickly, he said).

The Square René Viviani on the Left Bank across from Notre-Dame is another spot that is easy to miss. But this tranquil square features what is said to be the oldest tree in Paris — a false acacia brought to France from Virginia in 1601, and now shored up with concrete posts. Sitting on a park bench in one corner yields one of the best views in Paris — Notre-Dame on the right and St.-Julien-le-Pauvre, a tiny church built in the same era on the left.

And then there are the gardens that are the back or front yards of museums. For instance, at the cafe-garden of the Petit-Palais— with its palm and banana trees and sculptures and mosaic floors lit from below — a half dozen marble tables and metal chairs offer the ideal setting to watch the museum’s stone walls change from buff to tawny yellow as the sun moves.

Spring

The grass is cut, and the beer is gone. It's time to think about... Gardens! A friend sent me this article from which I'm posting an excerpt. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article in the NY Times. You'll want to see their slide show. Enjoy.

Dharma in the Dirt

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

MUIR BEACH, Calif.

AS a proudly Birkenstocked Zen gardener, Wendy Johnson can mindfully muster up affection for many of the earth’s species, with the possible exception of persimmon-devouring gophers.

But poison hemlock holds a special place in her heart.

Without the presence of this pernicious carrot look-alike, a potent vertigo-inducing poison that when ingested can cause death, she reasons, her garden would be all cloying lilac- and lily-scented perfection — boring, in short. The innocent-looking malevolent weed, which she allows to flourish for its capacity to draw rich minerals from the soil for compost, “gives the garden its punch,” she said, “snapping me back to my senses.”

Like her beloved hemlock, Ms. Johnson has deep taproots in California. Her own garden, bordered by a mountain creek with a view of the Pacific Ocean, lies down the road from the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, where she helped pioneer the concept of organic gardening in the United States. Now the farm’s unofficial gardener emeritus, she lived at Green Gulch for 25 years, marrying, raising her two children and growing produce for Greens Restaurant, which was founded by the Center in 1979.

Long before Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver wrote best-selling books about eating foods grown locally, Ms. Johnson, with a long-necked English watering can perpetually in hand, was cultivating an awareness of how lettuce grown au naturel can also feed the soul.

“You should taste this place,” she said, offering a visitor dried lemon verbena tea from the garden, her wide eyes bringing to mind a surprised lemur.

It is a cliché to say that gardening is meditative. But few have meditated as long and as earnestly as Ms. Johnson, who arrived at “the Gulch” with a sweaty Kelty backpack in 1975 after trekking much of the way from Tassajara, a rugged Zen outpost in the Ventana Wilderness. In her new book, “Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World” — part memoir, part Sunset Magazine sitting on the floor mindfully eating a raisin in the zendo — she ponders such questions as whether it’s O.K. for life-embracing Buddhists to crush snails (ask forgiveness first) or to trap gophers (breathe deep, then fence instead).

For Ms. Johnson, who occasionally waters the Buddha statue in her greenhouse to, as she says, “bring him to life a little bit,” gardening is about far more than Gravenstein apple trees or David Austin heirloom roses. It is to literally know “the heart and mind of your place,” and in so doing, to know your own heart and mind as well. “I am often most alert and settled in the garden when I am working hard, hip deep in a succulent snarl of spring weeds,” she writes. “My mind and body drop away then, far below wild radish and bull thistle, and I live in the rhythmic pulse of the long green throat of my work.”

Her looks betray her place: an unapologetic 60, Ms. Johnson has earthmother-y white hair, liver spots, knee socks and gnarly rose-scratched hands that horrify her two fashionable younger sisters in New York and Los Angeles. (“We’d look like you if we didn’t take care of ourselves!” they tell her — lovingly, she insists.)

Her primer on meditation and gardening is similarly steeped in northern California, a place where, since the 1960s, cultivation of the land and the self have been intertwined. Less widely known than Chez Panisse or the zen center’s own restaurant, Greens, the farm has influence that has nevertheless extended far beyond its terroir, a fertile dragon-shaped swath of what was once compressed ocean bottom at the foot of Mount Tamalpais.

From it germinated a movement toward “conscious eating and conscious growing, linked with the ethic of taking care of the land,” said Randolph Delehanty, a San Francisco historian. The organic Buddhists, led by Ms. Johnson; her husband, Peter Rudnick; and two influential teachers, Alan Chadwick and Harry Roberts, were “among the first people to take the idea of stewardship of the land and make a lifestyle out of it,” said Fred Bové, the former education director for the San Francisco Botanical Garden Society.

As a gardener, Ms. Johnson combines the conventional and the not-so. She grows roses and apple trees but also advocates compost and manure teas to boost the immune systems of plants (add 2-3 cups well decomposed compost or live manure per gallon of water; steep for 3 days). A columnist for Tricycle, the Buddhist magazine, she occasionally lapses into the woo-woo in the book, defining “inter-being” as “looking mindfully at broccoli and beet plants” and knowing that you are all one.

In her own garden, which she describes as “wild and bestial,” a hot tub deemed ugly on the deck is concealed by tangles of jasmine, narcissus and other plants, including several opium poppies. “The bees love them,” she observed of the poppies. “They’re medicating themselves right and left.”

The hot tub overlooks a pond filled with rainwater where otters occasionally do the backstroke and frogs make chirping sounds at night (she holds the phone over the pond to comfort her daughter, Alisa, a freshman at Bard, when she is homesick). Ms. Johnson meditates daily here, sitting on the cushion she stores beneath the living room sofa, where the cat sleeps (“stray cats target Buddhist households,” she said).

Having just finished shovelling the snow

Having just finished shovelling the snow, one's thoughts turn naturally to ... Flower Arranging!

If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the Aikido Journal, specifically to a blog entry by Dave Lowry. Mr. Lowry is a senior practictioner of Classical Japanese Martial Arts, and was taught ikebana (flower arranging) by the wife of his kenjutsu sensei. There is an excerpt below. Also, if you click here, you will be directed to the Wikipedia article on ikebana. Enjoy.

Of all the requisites faced by the budoka (“martial artist”) contemplating the construction of a new dojo or training facility, the tokonoma (“alcove”), with its space for the display of arranged flowers, could rank in importance somewhere between solar-powered showers and cashmere mats. Pragmatism must sometimes take precedence over aesthetics. Safe, durable training floor surfaces, adequate dressing facilities, and so on, are more apt to concern dojo builders than will a shelf devoted to flower arrangements. Later on, the tasks of training, teaching, and maintaining the dojo are more likely to occupy its inhabitants than are such matters perceived solely as decorative like the arranging and display of flowers. This is reasonable. But it also risks the development of dojo—and we need not look far to find examples of these—that are physically healthy but seriously lacking in their collective soul. They are filled with budoka who are learning well the outer, physical aspects of their art. Yet something seems missing, something internal, unidentifiable in words by the students perhaps, although palpable if by no other sense than by its absence. A good many trends that today surface in budo (“martial Ways”) training, the recent interest in some of the spiritual aspects of the martial Ways, for example, appear fundamentally to be efforts at nurturing or reestablishing this spirit, this attitude, this matter of what we might call the budo’s “soul.”

Bonsai Aesthetics

This article is copied from an article by the same name at www.answers.com. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to that article where there is much more information, links, pictures, etc.

Bonsai Aesthetics vary according to the style of bonsai which is sought and according to individual tastes. The discussion of bonsai characteristics may be discussed in two parts: general aesthetics and aesthetic schools.

General Aesthetics

The following characteristics are desirable in many Japanese bonsai and other styles of container-grown trees, whatever the style:

Miniaturization

By definition, a bonsai is a tree which is kept small enough to be container-grown in while otherwise fostered to have a mature appearance. One way in which bonsai are classified is according to size. Mame are ideally less than 10 cm (4 inches) tall and can be held in the palm of the hand. Shohin are about 25 cm (10 inches) tall, while other bonsai are larger and can not be easily moved.[1]

Gravitas

This is the trait which all of the remaining points of aesthetics seek to create. It is a sense of physical weight, the illusion of mass, the appearance of maturity or advanced age, and the illusive quality of dignity.

Leaf Reduction

Leaf reduction is a related to the general miniaturization described above but is something which varies over the life cycle of a particular bonsai. For example, a bonsai’s leaves might be allowed to attain full-size for many years in order to encourage vigor and growth of some other aspect of the bonsai. It is usually desirable to attain a degree of leaf reduction prior to exhibiting a bonsai. Leaf reduction may be encouraged by pruning and is sometimes achieved by the total exfoliation of a bonsai during one part of its growing season. Conifer needles may be more difficult to reduce than other sorts of foliage.

Lignification

This refers to the “woody-ness” of a bonsai’s trunk and branches so that they have a mature appearance. This typically means the surface is encouraged to become rough and brown. In some cases this aesthete will vary, such as in a birch tree bonsai attaining the white colour and exfoliating bark of a mature specimen.

Nebari

Also known as "buttressing", nebari is the visible spread of roots above the growing medium at the base of a bonsai. Nebari helps a bonsai seem grounded and well-anchored and helps a tree look old, mature, and more akin to a full-sized tree.[1]

Ramification

Ramification is the splitting of branches and twigs into smaller ones. It is encouraged by pruning and may be integrated with practices that promote leaf reduction.

Deadwood

Bonsai artists sometimes foster certain types of deadwood to be produced by and remain on a bonsai tree, just as such things as bare, dead branches may occur on full-sized trees. Two specific types of deadwood are jin and shari. The presence of deadwood is more optional and less typical than most of the other points mentioned here.[1]

Curvature

Like deadwood, curvature is optional. Bonsai that achieve a sense of age while remaining straight and upright can be especially impressive, but many bonsai (including the stereotypical bonsai illustrated above) rely upon curvature of the trunk to give it the illusion of weight and age. Curvature of the trunk that occurs between the roots and the lowest branch is known as tachiagari.[1]

Aesthetic schools

The art of artistically growing small trees in containers may be divided into two primary "schools" of practice:

Japanese (bonsai)

The term "bonsai' properly refers only to this, the Japanese art of growing miniature trees. The Japanese aesthetic is centered on the principle of "heaven and earth in one container". In its perfection, bonsai is an expression of Zen Buddhism and expresses how the past, the present, humanity, the elements and change all are intertwined into this unique method of meditation and expression.[2]

The Japanese bonsai are meant to evoke the essential spirit of the plant being used: in all cases, they must look natural and never show the intervention of human hands. However, the art of bonsai also has strict criteria for success and rigid rules which are rarely broken. For example, tree branches must never cross and trees should bow slightly forward, never lean back.[3]

Chinese (penjing)

The Chinese art of growing miniature trees, properly called penjing, seeks to capture the essence and spirit of nature through contrasts. Philosophically, this craft is influenced by the principle of Taoism, specifically the concept of Yin and Yang: the conceptualization of the universe as governed by two primal opposing but complementary forces. Inspiration is not limited to nature, but also from poetry and visual art, of which factor similar aesthetic considerations. Common themes include dragons and the strokes of fortuitous characters. At its highest level, the artistic value of penjing is on par with that of poetry, calligraphy, brush painting and garden art.[3]

Penjing has less emphasis on technical perfection, and the art is not as rigidly categorized as the art of bonsai, and such things as tangled roots or pruning scars (which are against the bonsai aesthete) are allowed if it fits the overall design. Miniature images places next to a miniature tree (such as miniature pagodas and tiny men with fishing rods) belong strictly to the realm of penjing and are anathema to the realm of bonsai.[3]

Building a Zen Garden

Want to build a Zen garden? Want to read this book for free? This website has "draft chapters of the book, with photographs of each stage of the construction. "

Click on the title of this post to be directed to the book in progress.

Enjoy

Gardens

With tomorrow being the first day of winter, our thoughts naturally turn to ...gardens. What follows is an excerpt from a newspaper article. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article.

Visiting Asia Without Crossing the Pacific in Portland, Ore.
By DAVID LASKIN
IT’S a chilly Sunday in late autumn and a steady shower is falling on the Portland Classical Chinese Garden. Rain silvers the pebble mosaic in the Court of Tranquillity and dimples the surface of Zither Lake. Budding camellias shine, bamboo shoots nod and recover, the huge leaves of banana trees, already shredded by previous storms, tap out a few faint spattered notes.

“Too bad it’s not raining harder,” our smiling guide, Frances Chin, murmurs as we watch droplets slide off the roof tiles of the Hall of Brocaded Clouds near the garden entrance. “In a real downpour, rain streams off the roof and forms a curtain in front of the pavilion like strings of pearls.”

Everyone told me to come back in the rain when I first visited the Chinese Garden two days earlier during a rare burst of November sun, and they were right. All of the Portland gardens I saw in the course of a long weekend — Tanner Springs Park and Jamison Square, the new pocket parks in the trendy downtown Pearl District; the International Rose Test Garden perched high above the city in Washington Park; the display gardens of local specialty nurseries — looked lovely under low dripping skies. But the Chinese and Japanese gardens, the crown jewels of the City of Roses, were loveliest of all. Different as they are, these two Asian gardens both rely on pattern, structure and metaphor instead of the floral can-can of typical American gardens. Rain, especially the mild intermittent rain of the Pacific Northwest winter, is their varnish.

Usually I prefer to avoid the tours and wander around gardens on my own, but I’m glad I had a guide on both my visits to the Chinese Garden. Just one acre on a single city block in the midst of Portland’s funky Old Town Chinatown, this is a garden layered with hidden meaning.

On first glance, I see more architecture than garden: nine ornate pavilions clustered around a large, irregularly shaped shallow pond and linked by bridges and covered walkways; walled courtyards paved with patterned stones and studded with pale upright rocks that look like petrified chunks of Swiss cheese; columns, wooden panels and portals set with signs in Chinese characters. Yes, there are plants — lovely willows that weep into the pond, pines clipped into bristling asymmetrical pincushions, a persimmon with globes of big orange fruit — but they seem to decorate the hardscape rather than the other way around.

Gloria Lee Luebke, the executive director, explains that the garden, like the traditional Ming Dynasty scholar’s gardens in the ancient city of Suzhou on which it is patterned, incorporates five essential elements — poetry, rock, water, architecture and plants — with no one element taking pride of place. A Chinese scholar’s garden was not meant to be a distilled mountain landscape in the Japanese manner or a clipped green theater like Italy’s Renaissance gardens, but rather an intricate urban salon where a retired scholar gathered with friends to write poetry, sip wine, observe the water rippling in the moonlight and listen to the music of the rain.

“These gardens were designed to frame a view in each direction,” Ms. Luebke says as we duck through an unadorned rectangular aperture into the Fragrance Courtyard, the first of two courtyards leading to the scholar’s study. “Though the garden is small, people do get lost here.”

For a minute we just stand and let the elements compose themselves. Crisp, lush specimens of jasmine, gardenia and mock orange stand out in sharp relief against the blank canvas of the white wall — a study in dormant fragrance. In just a few weeks, the waxy yellow blossoms of the wintersweet — now a humble-looking mound of bare sticks — will spice up the entire courtyard with the first intoxicating fragrance of the new year.

A moon gate at the far end inscribes a circle around the trees and shrubs of the next courtyard, a view that I now realize is as carefully arranged as a scroll painting. Ms. Luebke translates the Chinese inscriptions over the gate: “Read the landscape,” it says on one side; “Listen to the fragrance,” on the other. For me, this is the “ah-ha” moment when I stop trying to impose my own tastes and assumptions and just let the garden speak to me.

Two days later, in the rain, its speech is even more eloquent. I’m inside the elegant scholar’s study, the heart of the place, admiring the penjing (or potted landscape, the Chinese version of bonsai) set on the delicate rosewood tables. The yellow leaves of a dwarf ginkgo tree lie scattered on the lacquered desktop beside three blue-and-white Ming-style vases. Rain beads the bamboo culms outside. A midnight blue Steller’s jay flashes by the window. Pure visual poetry just crying out for the light touch of a wise calligrapher.

AFTER the tight urban block of the Chinese Garden, Portland’s Japanese Garden is like a clearing in the forest, a glade that has been touched lightly and deftly by the hand of an artist. It’s not raining at the moment, but there is something indescribably fresh and damp and uplifting about this garden set several hundred feet above the city in the woods of 5,000-acre Forest Park.

“This is my favorite time of year,” says the veteran guide Sue Stegmiller as we stand listening to water trickling into the stone basin of the tsu-bai (hand-washing fountain) just inside the front gate. “As our former head gardener Mike Miller puts it: ‘In spring the garden shows its charisma, but in winter it shows its essence.’ ” The moss curling over the stone lanterns and fountains is as glossy as seaweed; the contorted black pines just inside the entry gate gleam as if made of glass. Every vista has a curtain hung at its end, a scrim of enormous Douglas fir and Western red cedar, the signature trees of the Pacific Northwest forest.

Even aficionados from Japan agree that this is the most authentic Japanese garden outside their country, except for that curtain of Northwest conifers. “These firs and cedars are too big,” says Ms. Stegmiller. “To Japanese they look overwhelming.” But they are also indispensable to the almost spiritual allure of the place.

Though it’s hard to imagine monkey cages and concession stands here, this was the site of the old Portland zoo before it was moved in 1959. The landscape architect Takuma Tono, brought over from Japan, magically transformed the forlorn 5.5 acres into five discreet gardens linked by paths and steps: a Strolling Pond Garden surrounding two small lakes, a Tea Garden, a Natural Garden of pruned trees and pools, a Zen-style Sand and Stone Garden, and a Flat Garden landscaped around a bed of raked sand. Part of Mr. Tono’s artistry is the way one garden flows subtly into the next, so that the scene shifts without ever breaking the spell.

Unlike a Chinese garden, which to Western eyes is so crusted with architecture, pavement and poetry as to hardly resemble a garden at all, Japanese gardens are familiar to the point of cliché with their lanterns, arched bridges, koi ponds and cherry trees. Or so I think until I take Ms. Stegmiller’s tour. She points out a hillside of azaleas that, come early spring, will cover itself in a snow of pure white blossoms that melts, figuratively, into the jade-green pond below. I learn that the pared-down style of the Tea Garden, with its moss-fringed stepping stones and simple evergreen shrubs, reflects the desire for refuge during the civil wars of the 16th century. The star magnolia near the entrance to the Natural Garden has had its crown pruned flat and low so the flowers appear to rest on a shelf of branches.

A Scholar's Garden

If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to a website called "Chinapage." Click on the link for "Gardens" and you'll be directed to a page that explains briefly, the design of Chinese Gardens. By way of example, it has many links that discuss elements of a garden that was built on Staten Island, NY; the Scholar's Garden. There are links discussing the theory of the design, the elements involved, the interpretation, and so on.

If you have any interest at all in the way a proper garden is designed and constructed, this would be a very worthwhile link to follow.

Below is the text from the main page. Enjoy.


Traditional Chinese gardens go back almost 2,000 years to the Han Dynasty though most Scholar's Gardens date back to the more recent Ming and Qing dynasties.

A Scholar's Garden would have been built by a scholar or an administrator retiring from the emperor's court. It would have been an enclosed private garden always associated with a house which, in turn without its garden, would not have been considered whole.

This garden, designed and built by LAC, is enclosed by walls, a series of pavilions (eight in all), and covered walkways. These are all organized in an irregular manner to create in addition to the two major courtyards a series of six others of varying sizes.

The art of the Chinese garden is closely related to Chinese landscape painting - it is not a literal imitation of a natural landscape, but the capturing of its essence and spirit.

The parallel could be drawn to a Chinese hand scroll painting which as it unrolls, reveals a journey full of surprises and meditative pauses.

The enjoyment of the garden is both contemplative and sensual. It comes from making the most out of the experiences of everyday life, as such, architectural elements are always a part of a Scholar's Garden.

The painter's eye must be used to lay out the main architectural elements - the wall becomes the paper the rockery and plant are painted on. The structures playfully rise and fall, twist and turn and even "leave" the garden to take advantage of and even create a great variety of beautiful scenes.

To paraphrase the 15th century garden designer Ji Ching:

"The garden is created by the human hand, but should appear as if created by heaven."

Another Chinese Garden

If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the original article, which contains more pictures.

Chinese Garden Preview
Aug. 5, 2006 to Feb. 2007

Beginning Aug. 5, the public will have the opportunity to visit the Chinese Garden, when the site is opened for a six-month preview period while still a “work in progress.” Visitors will be able to stroll around the 1.5-acre lake bordered by craggy Tai Hu rocks and enjoy a landscape that includes five hand-carved stone bridges, a stream, and a canyon waterfall, set against a backdrop of mature oaks, camellias, and pines. In the months ahead, many plants native to China will be added as the landscape is developed.

Viewing the garden in this initial state will give visitors a sense of what’s to come. Foundations are already in place for the structures that will be built around the lake: pavilions, covered walkways, a tea shop, teahouse, and “poetic views” in the tradition of Suzhou-style scholar gardens.

The lake area will close again after the Lunar New Year in February 2007 so that construction can begin on the pavilions. Once complete, the lake and pavilions will comprise the “Summer Garden,” the first five acres of a planned 12-acresite. The Summer Garden is expected to open in fall 2008.

The preview coincides with the exhibition “Chrysanthemums on the Eastern Hedge:Gardens and Plants in Chinese Art,” opening Aug. 5 and continuing through Jan. 7, 2007. Organized by Chinese art historian June Li, curator of the Chinese Garden, the show will provide an overview of the decorative use and stylized motifs of botanical specimens in Chinese art. Painted scrolls, woodblock prints, porcelain and other objects from the 10th to the 18th centuries will be on view. The show, sponsored in part by Cathay Bank, is the first example of how the Chinese Garden will integrate with other institutional endeavors. The Chinese Garden will fundamentally serve as a cultural center and platform for education and research, a place for people throughout Southern California and the world to understand the cultural richness of Chinese gardens.

Chinese Garden

What follows is an interesting article about a Chinese Garden. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article, which contains more pictures.

Dreamer strives to cultivate ties between nations For quarter-century, he has tried to build S.F. Chinese garden
- Olivia Wu, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, June 25, 2006

(06-25) 04:00 PDT Luzhi, China -- Gazing through wistful willows whose branches graze the lake that laps his garden, an American dreams of building the ultimate garden some 6,000 miles away, across the Pacific Ocean.

The dreamer is William Wu, the garden is one he created from the dirt lot of his house outside Shanghai, and his mission is to install a public Chinese garden in his American home city of San Francisco.

"I want to bring out the most beautiful parts of traditional culture and make it meaningful for the future and to other countries," Wu said. "Building a garden is a part of it."

For Wu (no relation to this reporter), the Chinese garden has been a dream long deferred. First proposed as part of a San Francisco-Shanghai Sister City Committee agreement a quarter-century ago, the project drifted for want of a space. But now, committee Chairman James Fang expects a decision to be made within a month that would set aside the space -- possibly in Golden Gate Park -- so that fundraising to build and maintain the garden can begin.

This "gift to the city," as Fang calls it, might not have gotten even to this stage without Wu, whose passion for cultural exchange -- and gardens -- stems in part from a decades-long commitment to building bridges between the two nations.

"He's our prime contact with the Chinese intelligentsia in the arts sense," said Tom Klitgaard, a San Francisco attorney and founding member of the Sister City Committee.

Based in Luzhi, a village about 60 miles outside of Shanghai that is fast becoming a suburb of the uber-metropolis, Wu's house and garden speak of traditional China.

The garden is filled with six varieties of bamboo as well as lace-bark elm, green-trunked parasol trees, fragrant osmanthus and jasmine, rare maples and, of course, waving willows. The foliage is either native to China or described in classical Chinese literature.

"The idea behind a Chinese garden is layering and veiling," he said. It is a prism of experiences.

It instills, by placement of rocks, by the shape of the walls and rooflines, tree plantings and details of the design, a heightened sense of nature and a dynamic of balance.

"I want to be sure that the meaning of the garden comes through,'' Wu said, as a place that honors nature and as a place that inspires humanism and literary creativity. That way when Westerners enter the garden, they understand the complete literary, architectural, artistic and historical context of its composition.

Given such a context, he said, "The Chinese learn something as well. It's a lesson for both sides, if we do it correctly."

San Francisco Japanese Tea Garden

If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to original on line news article, where you'll find more pictures.

Thursday, January 19, 2006
(SF Chronicle)
SAN FRANCISCO/Tempest in Japanese Tea Garden/Move to restore fidelity to design, oust the schlock
Charles Burress,
Chronicle Staff Writer

A conflict over cultural sensitivity is brewing at a Bay Area landmarkfamous for its image of tranquility -- the Japanese Tea Garden in GoldenGate Park. The generic souvenirs and junk food sold in the 5-acre garden's tea houseand its gift shop are a glaring intrusion of tourist schlock, someJapanese American community leaders contend. The 112-year-old oasis, the oldest public Japanese garden in the UnitedStates, should more accurately reflect Japanese culture for hundreds ofthousands of visitors annually, the community leaders say.

"We're very uncomfortable with the products being sold at the tea garden,"said Rich Hashimoto, president of the Japantown Merchants Association."They reflect more a Chinese culture than a Japanese culture. And thequality of the products doesn't meet our standards."

Hashimoto and leaders of other Japantown organizations are backing a bid from a Japanese American cafe owner to take over the concession from the current operator, a Chinatown business owner, and bring in more Japanese-themed food and items.

The concession battle includes the open-air tea house, where tea is served with a fortune cookie and other cookies for $3.20. Critics point to the racks of American candy bars and chips and to the casually-fitted robes the waitresses wear, which are meant to resemble normally snug kimonos.

Another irritant is that the tea menu is topped by jasmine tea, more of a Chinese staple. The fortune cookie in the tea service is no problem, however. The tea garden is the reputed birthplace of what has become known as the "Chinese fortune cookie," an American invention ubiquitous in Chinese restaurants in the United States but not commonly found in China.

In anotherJapanese-Chinese admixture, a scene for the recent film "Memoirs of a Geisha," which drew criticism for casting Chinese actresses in Japanese roles, was filmed in the garden.

The gift shop contains some Japanese items such geisha dolls, as well as some Chinese items like tomb-warrior figurines, but the lion's share ofthe merchandise could be found at a typical tourist shop in San Francisco-- cable-car mugs, giant lollipops, Alcatraz caps, little license plates bearing common American first names.

Carol Murata, who sits on the Japantown Merchants Association board and owns Murata's Cafe Hana, a cafe and flower shop in the Japan Center mall, submitted a proposal to the city's Recreation and Park Department to takeover the concession from Fred Lo, whose Chinatown Fashion House Inc. has held the contract for 14 years.

Murata's supporters stress fidelity to the heritage of a garden established by wealthy landscape designer Makoto Hagiwara for the Japanese Village exhibit at the California Midwestern International Exposition of1894. The Hagiwara family ran the garden until the World War II Japanese internment in 1942. Lo, who also has the Coit Tower concession, wants to keep the contract.

City staff members gave a higher bid score to Murata and recommended giving her the concession. The Recreation and Park Commission will consider the issue today.

"I don't know why they gave higher scores to her with no experience," said Lo.

He called Murata's projected 100 percent increase in revenue impossible. He also criticized her plan to offer higher-quality, more expensive goods, saying tourists don't want to spend much.

The city cares about the tea garden's finances because the Recreation and Park Department budget included $200,000 in rent from the concessionaire in fiscal 2004-05. The city received $1.1 million from visitors paying the$3.50-admission fee.

Lo's concession grossed $648,299 this past fiscal year, according to city records. He has hired two attorneys to represent him on the bid and what he called "a specialist ... to create a whole series of Japanese items."

Murata declined to comment, saying city staff members advised her not to. Her plan would add upgraded Japanese-themed gifts and menu items such assushi, miso soup and Japanese desserts, as well as Japanese cultural programs developed in cooperation with Japantown organizations.

"Japanese Americans operated it for many, many years," said businessman Allen Okamoto, co-organizer of the Japantown centennial commemorations this year.

"There was a little consternation in the community about a Chinese American taking over the Japanese Tea Garden." Lo said ethnicity, like gender, shouldn't matter: "You don't need a woman to design the latest dress."

When he took over from the former Japanese American operator, some workers were wearing Raiders' jackets and he helped restore authenticity, he said. Douglas Dawkins, a great-great grandson of Hagiwara, agreed that race is not the issue but said Murata's Japanese American background and ties to Japantown do matter.

"From the Hagiwara family perspective, it's not a racial issue," he said."It's an affinity for Japanese culture issue."

E-mail Charles Burress at http://us.f524.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=cburress@sfchronicle.com&YY=33309&order=up&sort=date&pos=0&view=a&head=b.