It was
Sunday. The paths were crowded.
It was
Florida. People walked by in shorts, talking on their phones. Some groups
chatted about other places, other
times.
times.
But the Morikami Japanese Gardens are about being here now.
Eventually
we found the gardens within the garden.
The website
for the Morikami Museum (https://morikami.org/roji-en/) and Japanese Gardens tells
us that the gardens are actually named "Roji-en: Garden of the Drops of
Dew," and were designed Hoichi Kurisu in 2001 and inspired by (but not
copies of) traditional garden styles. They were built on a large tract of donated land in the town of Delray Beach, by a colony of Japanese farmers who came there a century ago.
About a
thousand years ago, the Morikami Museum website tells us, Japan's ruling upper class adopted Chinese
garden design ideals featuring lakes and islands. Ideally these "gardens" were viewed from
a boat, and classic wooden bridges were part of the design. 
Today at Morikami, this is how
you start the tour, walking across a traditional little foot bridge to take in the lake and a
couple of islands, fringed with green and flowers beneath the reliably blue
skies. (Sorry, no boats.)
Anne and I
then followed the path along the lake's circumference, enjoying the rich landscape of trees, flowering plants
and frequent signed 'features' to look at (lake view, top photo). It takes me about half an
hour to realize that the site's layout encompasses six distinct 'formal'
gardens based on different styles, and periods, of the Japanese garden.
Our circumambulation of the lake represents the
oldest of these, the "Shinden-style" garden. The lake's two little islands,
the website points out, "are reached by a stately arched bridge similar to
those often painted vermilion in Japan after models originating in T’ang
Dynasty China (618 – c. 907)."
The second
of the six "gardens" -- a very elastic term, as we should not be
surprised to realize -- called "The Paradise Garden" features paths
(instead of boat rides) for strolling the perimeter of the garden's lake. I
cannot recall at what point we pass onto this path, though Anne recalls seeing a sign for "Paradise Garden." (Second photo down.) What I recall is that about halfway around the lake,
a labyrinth of paths begin to twist around one another in a complex design dimensionally more
intricate than, say, the NYC subway map.
This style developed, the site tells
us, from a troubled upper-class 12th century belief "in the western paradise, the Pure Land,
here on earth." The Paradise Garden is intended to help you visualize this place from a path along the perimeter of the garden's
lake: "Paths led from vantage point to vantage point from which changing
scenery could be viewed."A lovely idea.
Interestingly,
these gardens were not built for the old "nobility," but for the men and
women of the newly arisen samurai class whose "manner of attire," the website states, "allowed them
greater freedom out-of-doors. Garden paths typically led to a pavilion
overlooking the pond in which guests would gather to enjoy the recently
imported fashion of drinking tea."
The
Paradise Garden strikes me as a good name for any place where you overlook
water and contemplate a healing view, whether drinking tea or something stronger.
The "Early Rock
Garden" is a Zen garden, the only phrase I've ever associated with
Japanese gardens. The new style was favored by the now dominant samurai class, drawn to
Zen ideas of self-reliance and sacrifice. (I'm not sure that's the side of Zen
that caught on in the West.) The most obvious innovation in this style is the
replacement of water by rock (including sand or gravel; third photo down) meant to suggest waterfalls or watery surfaces. The
website says, "Often such gardens were in imitation, not of nature
directly, but of landscape ink paintings in the Southern Sung style... spare,
devoid of color, suggestive of a cogent inner truth."
We've
always taken Zen gardens as places designed for meditation. That seems pretty close to the idea.
The "Late Karesansui Garden" is also a rock
garden, now almost completely devoid of plants, consisting of flat expanses "of
raked gravel, with little more than a few well chosen rocks carefully placed
here and there," the website tells us. I am surprised to learn from the site's discussion of the difference between these two forms of Zen garden, that the early style was meant to represent "a tumbling waterfall."
Situated beside
the residence halls of Zen temples, these later gardens -- karesansui means
called “dry landscapes” -- took the abstraction of nature to an extreme,
banishing not only water but plants (fourth photo down). Nevertheless,"their uniqueness has made them the most widely recognized of all Japanese
garden types."
The Hiraniwa Flat
Garden, also consisting of a flat gravel floor built next to a residence, allows shrubs and
trees to make a reappearance into the garden on its farthest border, along with
"aesthetically positioned" rocks. Leaving abstraction far behind, this style also
permits garden ornaments such as pagodas, basins, wells,
lanterns, and stepping stones as "accents and focal points." Finally, this style
of garden brought in rustic huts (we saw a few of these at Morikami) to stage the practice of the tea ceremony, in
the late 1500s.
Morikami's Hiraniwa garden also makes
use of a view of the site's distant tiled-roof museum. The
technique is called shakkei, or “borrowed scenery.” How brilliant is that?
In our backyard
garden in Quincy, the 'borrowed scenery' includes a bicycle, basketball
backboard, and the Y-shaped posts holding up a neighbor's deck. In my defense, we didn't have
a lot of choice in this regard. I tend to look at all our neighborhood views as
"installations" in search of a museum.
The final
garden style, in terms of temporal development, is called the "Modern
Romantic Garden," a name I also enjoy. Closest to our own traditional
notion of a garden, this style reflects Western influence, but also marks a
return to the direct observation of nature.
Morikami's
example of the style includes a "long-legged kotoji lantern"
that, the website tells us, "mimics the form of the movable bridges of the
stringed instrument called a koto."
I
don't where to put the flowing streams and waterfalls, and the gravity-based bamboo
pump used to fill a basin we encountered on our visit, along with flowering plants and
interesting trees, or the extensive display of bonsai trees we enjoyed encountering in our stroll around this series of
intricate gardens.
In
my very loose, contemporary view of the idea of "garden," this entire
place qualifies as a one big magnificent garden.
You
might also call it a "living museum."
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