A tradition of gardens made by setting stones, water and plants after the forms of nature, from the pond gardens of the Heian court and the dry landscapes of Zen temples to the tea garden and the great stroll gardens of the Edo period.
The Japanese garden took its first forms from China and Korea, but by the Heian period (794–1185) it had its own rules. The estates of the court nobility at Heian-kyō had a court of white sand before the main hall, then a pond with islands, bridges and a stream entering from the east (A south court for ceremony, water from the east). The Sakuteiki, written in the late eleventh century, gathers the practice into a book: it explains how to make ponds, islands, streams and waterfalls, and above all how to set stones, following the “request” of each stone and the lie of the land (Follow the request of the stones). The pond gardens of the Pure Land temples, such as the Byōdō-in at Uji (1053), pictured the paradise of the Amida Buddha.
Under the Zen monasteries of the Muromachi period (1336–1573) the garden became smaller and more abstract. The priest Musō Soseki (1275–1351) made the gardens of Saihō-ji and Tenryū-ji; the latter takes in the hills of Arashiyama behind it as borrowed scenery. The karesansui, the dry landscape garden, represents mountains and water by stones and raked gravel alone (The dry landscape). At Ryōan-ji in Kyoto, fifteen stones in five groups stand in a rectangle of raked white gravel about 25 metres long, enclosed by a low earthen wall; at Daisen-in, a narrow strip of stones and gravel shows a waterfall becoming a river.
The tea ceremony of the sixteenth century brought the roji, the dewy path to the teahouse: stepping stones, a stone basin for washing the hands, stone lanterns, and planting kept deliberately modest. From the seventeenth century the great lords and the imperial family built stroll gardens, kaiyū-shiki, in which a path leads round a large pond past a sequence of scenes, some of them miniatures of famous places: the Katsura Imperial Villa (from about 1615), Shūgaku-in (1650s) with its borrowed mountain views, Kōraku-en in Okayama and Kenroku-en in Kanazawa.
The plants are few and worked hard. Black and red pines are pruned for decades to look old and windswept; azaleas and other evergreens are clipped into rounded masses, karikomi, that echo the hills; moss covers the ground in the damp gardens of Kyoto; maples give autumn colour and cherries the spring. Each plant and stone stands for something larger than itself, and the scale of the garden is set by the eye from fixed points: a veranda, a path, a window.