The middle section of the interview, translated below, sets forth some of the ideas oyakata often emphasized while I was an apprentice, ideas which he has continued to emphasize in conversations that I have had with him since completing my apprenticeship. Here is the translation:

“To offer an explanation, it should be reasonable to understand the garden in the way you have seen it for yourself, in the way that you personally have experienced it. That is the way I would like to have you look at the garden.

Then again, it is possible to consider ‘indirect beauty’. That is, when you look at the garden, or when you look at yourself through the lens of the garden, what are the feelings that you experience?

The current way of understanding the world is individualistic, but I feel that this approach is not unreasonable. Therefore, broadly speaking, I would hope that you are able to realize a new understanding of yourself in viewing the garden.”

This emphasis on the experience of the individual is contrary to one of the widely promoted explanations of the Japanese tradition, which places the focus upon understanding the garden as a manifestation of symbolic and religious meanings which are expected to be static.

I find the backdrop for this small explanation of his view of the garden quite interesting, however. The first garden is the Entokuin North Garden, as already mentioned, and the second garden shown is ‘The Garden of the Three Shapes’, a courtyard garden inside the Main Hall of Kenninji Zen Temple in Kyoto. In the case of the Entokuin North Garden, Kitayama restored a Momoyama-period garden, and although ‘The Garden of the Three Shapes’ is an original work by Kitayama, the construction of a courtyard garden within the main hall of a major Zen Buddhist monastery is not a context for unbridled self-expression.

Although Kitayama expected us to understand ourselves as individuals, especially as we completed apprenticeship and went on to design and build gardens as independent garden creators, we were also expected to know when and how to strike an appropriate balance between innovation and self-expression on the one hand, and preservation and ‘following the rules’ on the other. Understanding how to combine these two is a significant riddle.

My apprenticeship to Kitayama Yasuo had a profound influence on the way that I view the Japanese garden, and forced me to question premises that are often considered to be the ‘laws’ of the tradition. I have often wanted to capture the key to his thinking- this video, posted as part of the series ‘My Favorite Place’ found on Youtube Japan, presents his thinking in his own words, with the benefit of beautiful film from Kodaiji and Kenninji, where he built new gardens, and from Entokuin, where he was responsible for the restoration of a Momoyama-period dry landscape.

The garden at Entokuin is the backdrop to the middle section of the video, as Kitayama explains how to view the garden. I was part of the team that worked on that restoration during the first year of my apprenticeship, and it is a garden where I learned many real lessons about the Japanese garden and the art of setting stone.

The film is in Japanese, and so I will be posting a transcript in English shortly.

I went in to the hospital yesterday morning for an epidural cortisone injection. The procedure was fairly rapid: once I was checked in and everything was ready, they took me into the surgery room and injected a local anesthetic at the point where the epidural needle would enter my neck (can something that long be called a needle?)- just below the collar line, and slightly to the left of the jugular vein. They used a fluoroscope to monitor the progression of the needle, and when they felt certain they were on the nerve, they injected a dye to confirm they were inside the nerve sheath, and that is this picture: a view from my front towards my back, with the needle going through my neck, entering at the front, and continuing all the way through my neck to my spine, and the dye spreading along the nerve inside the nerve sheath.

With that confirmation, they injected the cortisone, removed the needle, and sent me home smelling like iodine.

The cessation of pain has been miraculous so far. I am keeping my fingers crossed, which is much easier now that I can feel them again.

Good intentions to post were waylaid by a shoulder problem that evolved into serious nerve pain, an uninterrupted stretch of pain that has kept me company through nights and days, and has overcome an assortment of painkillers and other medications (I have stopped short of anything that might intrigue Rush Limbaugh). Between one thing and another, this pain has continued for five weeks- but now I finally have a diagnosis (bulging disc at C6/C7) and a treatment scheduled (and epidural shot that we hope works), so I am hoping to get back to things soon.

There is plenty to write about- a new 15 stone group that I am really excited about, including some video clips of the work being done; a talk for the Portola Valley Garden Club, that inspired me to put some thoughts about ‘the trouble with natives’ into words; and there are stories behind some of my portfolio projects waiting to be told.

For now, I will suffice with a promise to write more soon, and this photograph- a shot of the same oak seen in the photo for the last post, this time with snow blanketing the sky -I will leave poetic inspiration to the reader: the view of the ridge across the creek washed out to a grey shadow speaks beyond silence.

What do trees think of mountains? Do they remember sky as they move slowly through centuries? Do they stir with the rushing of water after a winter rain?

They must see soil differently than we do, toes spread out over stones, buried beneath mosses and fallen leaves, rich in the life of the soil. As they feed so that others might eat, the fungi and the worms, it seems such a marvelous cycle: sun becomes wood, wood becomes food, food becomes soil, and in the warmth of the spring sun, after rains and fungi, come flowers.

In the beauty of quiet moments, will the flowers remember us? Do we become the nourishment of that which will follow? In this season of giving, amidst the solitude, what gifts do we bring to this place?

The Bashodo sits nestled against the mountains of the Higsashiyama district between Maruyama Park and Kodaiji. The street along the skirt of the mountains is busy there, where it jogs right and then left around some houses, crowded with pedestrians travelling to and from the more famous sights to the north and south, young men pulling rickshaws (jinrikisha being the Japanese name) loaded with tourists in kimono, and the occasional taxi beeping to clear the passage. The houses sitting in this corner sit right against the street, and although the houses themselves are no more than 10 or fifteen feet from the road, they seem to retain the sense of being at great distance. It is as if the contrast between the houses, so deeply rooted to the history of the soil, and the tourists, passing through like a breeze, occupy two separate realms.

The Bashodo was erected in honor of Basho by Takakuwa Ranko, an Edo period Haiku poet. The small hut houses a statue of the poet said to b e carved by Morikawa Kyoriku. I was walking south, heading toward the temples of Kodaiji and Entokuin where I had done so much work as an apprentice, and as I passed by the cuckoo began to sing from the nearby woods. It was a powerfully poetic moment- the song of the cuckoo has been an image in Japanese poetry since the Heian period, especially the image of the bird practicing its song during the rainy season- and I paused for a moment to linger in memories of things both near and distant.

On the gate post, a small plastic placard warned the passers-by: ‘Security Camera Installed’, and I thought to myself:

Cuckoo- at Basho’s hermitage, a security camera

Which is actually a haiku in Japanese, and would constitute the only thing I have written that I would refer to as such- which also seems fitting; however, the Japanese will have to wait for me to enable Japanese language on this blog.

(This was originally written in Kyoto, June 20 2010- Mark)

Cold rains have come, and between these rains I went looking for winter. It was challenging weather to find beauty in the wilderness: the stormy skies that would make early dormancy dramatic had passed, and in their wake the light was bright and flat, and the sky a deceptively deep blue considering the cold of the breese. Meanwhile, the fresh growth that reveals the renewal of life has yet to appear, leaving the scene bereft of vistas that might be considered conventionally beautiful. It was a moment that I enjoyed greatly: there was a deep sense of peace in the plants as they wound down through the tail end of dormancy, a pause for breath and a closeness to the season unheard of in the manicured domestic landscape.

Wondering where to go, I headed for the chaparral: it is time for the buckeye seeds to fall, and the Coyote Bush to seed, I thought. I did not find the buckeye or coyote bush- they must have scattered with the rains we had earlier in the season. Chaparral is an ecosystem of shrubs and herbaceous perennials adapted to shallow soils and hot dry summers, and I found myself well rewarded for such an impromptu rush to the nearest un-paved surface (see the gallery, Winter for Willows). Much of what I saw were the remains of seed husks, rendered silver and grey by months of sunlight, but they captured what I had been searching for: the potential of stillness, and the beauty of the land that I live on.

It seems standard to start a blog with some sort of confession- some explanation that sheds light on the ‘what and why’ of the sharing that is inherently part of the project.

All of the things that are gathered together here have had lives in other places. viagra of these have been public, as is the case with my work designing and speaking about the Japanese garden. Some have been more private, such as my writing about humans, the natural world, and the way that we live in the world as physical and spiritual beings. In this way, this is more accurately ‘a middle’ than it is ‘a beginning’.

There is the fresh energy of a beginning in exploring all of these ideas in one place among a much wider circle of friends, however, and the optimism that something in these ideas may inspire a new love for the spaces where our lives touch the natural world.

For several weeks it has been alternating between warm and hot here, and in the evenings we have looked at the stars while listening to the crickets chirping. My wife’s mother is visiting us from Kyoto, and she commented on how strange it is to be so far from home, yet listening to sounds that are so familiar. Yesterday, however, was a change- a dry cold front passed overhead, and following behind it we had a day of gusty winds. Last night was cold, the crickets were silent, and it truly started to feel like the cusp of autumn.

In Japan there has been a great sensitivity to the passage of the seasons for many centuries, and this understanding is woven into the fabric of daily life. In the Kokinshu (the first Imperial Anthology of waka poetry, published at the end of the 10th century) the natural events that mark the passage of each season- the emergence of spring shoots, the song of the nightingale, the first breeze of autumn- are used to evoke the emotion of each season. And so, because they using local materials and local patterns, the gardens in  Japan have this great sense of being part of the fabric of the ecosystem as a whole, as the transformations within the garden are one with the events of natural world beyond the garden wall.

For much of the Northeastern United States and Northern Europe there is a rhythm of seasons, with cold winters when life outside is largely dormant, short but exuberant growing seasons in spring and summer, and an autumn when leaves color and plants return to dormancy. However, in Northern California the cycle of the seasons follows a different path, and the beauty of our own seasons often seems to be lost in our hunger for a constantly ‘perfect’ garden, or at least gardens that follow a rhythm of seasons foreign to this place. We are now in the quiet season for Northern California- at the end of December, when people in other places might be huddled under a blanket thinking about snow-angels, or warming sweet sake over a fire of pine needles, our wilderness will be rejoicing in the rains and preparing the first flowers and leaves, which will start to emerge near the end of January. Now, at the end of September, our plants are huddled down, the chamise and sagebrush on the hillsides faded to a chocolate brown, the grasses bleached by sun to golds and silvers.

California buckeye at the margin of a meadow, late September

For gardeners who work with native plants, this is not news. It might be safe to say that anyone who works with native plants for even a little while will understand this. With this year’s change of seasons I am re-reading Judith Larner Lowry’s book Gardening with a Wild Heart, and again finding that it is a great place to start thinking about the seasons of Northern California, or to find inspiration anew as each day brings its own small change.