Authors: David and Michiko Young
I confess to a passionate interest in Japanese art, culture and aesthetics, so this book was too wonderful to pass over. I’m not sure how many students will borrow it, but it will be on display and like many of our books of colourful and fascinating photographs will get lots of passing interest.
Japanese gardens do not exist to merely look quaint. They are intended as expressions of various aspects of both Buddhist and Shinto philosophy, and are designed to act upon the viewer’s mind or spirit as much as to please the eye. Any book about Japanese gardens that deals only with lists of plants or landscape techniques would really fail to grapple with the function of these exquisite art forms. The authors, fortunately, give a good historical and philosophical introduction, many fascinating details of techniques, and then extensive illustrations and descriptions of famous gardens of many sorts.
I was especially pleased to see that as well as quarter page photographs illustrating points in the text, they have included a number of full double page spreads, and also used nicely detailed drawings to clarify details of special techniques and garden layouts. Each chapter is richly supported with illustrations. There is a lot of text, despite all the illustrations. The book runs to over 170 pages... my main quibble would be that a rather small font size has been used for body text and illustration captions.
It is far beyond the capacity of most of us to re-create the larger temple or palace gardens... I was fascinated by one photograph showing at least six workers busy shaping and manicuring four incredible old trees. The book isn’t really designed to show one “how to do it”. It would be a wonderful resource for someone planning to travel to Japan, and is certainly a beautiful presentation in reasonable depth for those with an interest in the gardens Japan has created for the world to wonder at.
I could not resist adding my own photograph of one of the mysterious sand mounds discussed in the book.
Andrew Lack
Head of the Odell Learning Resources Centre
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