Inside Your Japanese Garden: A Guide to Creating a Unique Japanese Garden for Your Home

by Joseph Cali, Sadao Yasumoro

Overview

Learn how to create a tranquil outdoor space at home with this practical and inspiring guide!

With instructive drawings and step-by-step techniques, Inside Your Japanese Garden walks you through designing and creating your very own Japanese garden. From small projects like benches and gates, to larger undertakings like bridges and mud walls, this book provides a wide variety of ways to enhance the space around your home, no matter the size. Instructions on how to work with stone, mud and bamboo—as well as a catalogue of the 94 plant varieties used in the gardens shown in the book—round out this complete guide.

This book also features 19 gardens that author Sadao Yasumoro has designed and built in Japan, and some—like those at Visvim shop in Tokyo and at Yushima Tenjin in Tokyo—are open to the public. From small tsuboniwa courtyard gardens to a large backyard stroll garden with water features, stairs and walls, these real-life inspirations will help spark your own garden plan.

These inspirational garden projects include:

• Tea Garden for an Urban Farmhouse featuring a clay wall with a split-bamboo frame and a stone base
• The Landslide That Became a Garden with a terraced slope, trees, bushes, long grasses and moss
• A Buddha's Mountain Retreat of Moss and Stone with vertical-split bamboo and brushwood fencing
• Paradise in an Urban Jungle with a pond, Japanese-style bridge, and stone lanterns

Each garden is beautifully photographed by Hironori Tomino and many have diagrams and drawings to show the essential elements used in the planning and construction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9784805316146
Publisher:	Tuttle Publishing
Publication date:	03/08/2022
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	224,884
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Joseph Cali was born and raised in New York City and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in Fine Art and Painting. He has lived and worked in Japan as an interior designer, graphic designer, copywriter and illustrator for over 30 years. His work has appeared in numerous books and publications. He is the coauthor, with Azby Brown, of The Japanese Dream House. His other books include The New Zen Garden and Create Your Own Japanese Garden.

Sadao Yasumoro, now in his eighties, has been a Japanese garden designer and builder for over 60 years. After high school he traveled all around Japan to study nature and visit the country's great gardens, and was deeply moved by the beauty of garden landscapes made by unknown masters. He went on to study under some of Japan's most famous garden designers, including Katsuo Saito. Yasumuro's work has appeared in many publications in Japan. This is his first book in English.

Table of Contents

Getting Started: Don't Follow This Manual 7

Chapter 1 The Garden, the Entrance and the Automobile 19

A Wall of Memory in a Shady Garden 20

Garden of the NASA Astrophysicist 24

A Garden for Lasting Relations 28

A Professor's Terrace of Stone, Horsetails and Water 34

The Salaryman's Rice Terrace Garden 38

The Rustic Elegance of the Amigasa Mon Gate 42

Chapter 2 Backyards and Gardens of the Gods 49

Paradise in an Urban Jungle 50

A Stairway up the Mountain 54

The Landslide That Became a Garden 58

How to Make a Koshikake Machiai Covered Waiting Bench 62

The Urban Farmer with a Backyard Stroll Garden 66

How to Make a Small Dobashira Earthen Bridge 71

The Garden of Plum Blossoms and Students' Prayers 72

How to Make a Large Dobashira Earthen Bridge 78

Buddha's Mountain Retreat of Moss and Stone 82

The Tatsutagawa River Garden 88

Garden of the Bell Tower 92

Chapter 3 Small Sanctuaries and Gardens for Refreshment 97

Garden for a Tea Get-together 98

Arranging Stones for the Koshikake Machiai Covered Waiting Bench 102

A Tea Garden for an Urban Farmhouse 104

View of a Tsuboniwa from the Couch 108

Climb the Stairs to a Private Gem 110

A Small Garden Made by the Birds 114

A Tsuboniwa for Visvim 118

Reconstructing an Old Teahouse 122

Chapter 4 Some Other Things You Should Know 126

Handling Stone and Making a Japanese-style Stone Wall 126

Mud on the Walls, Mud on the Floors 142

Working with Bamboo 148

List of plants appearing in this book 156

Index 157

Gardens in this book that can be visited 159

Acknowledgments 159

Editorial Reviews

09/20/2021

“Gardening is not a theory. It is all about learning the various scenes presented by nature,” write designers Cali (The New Zen Garden) and Yasumoro in this highly detailed overview of 20 Japanese gardens. The authors begin with an introduction to Japanese gardening, outlining such fundamentals as digging a hole to determine drainage and soil content, and cover concepts including size variation in plants and other features (“three stones are never the same size”) to create perspective. The garden overviews that follow include a wealth of design schemata and background information about gardening’s history and religious philosophy: “A Garden for Lasting Relations” in Tokyo features Japanese sago palm trees, which are believed to “keep the devil away,” while in “Paradise in an Urban Jungle” the authors introduce the concept of shakkei, which means “borrowed scenery.” Then there’s “The Garden of Plum Blossoms and Students’ Prayers,” a garden near a famous shrine in Tokyo, which makes use of misogi, or purification by water. The lush photographs and encouraging tone are a boost: When Cali asks Yasumoro what one word defines the Japanese garden, Yasumoro answers, “Heart.” Fans of garden design will want to give this a look. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Fans of garden design will want to give this a look"—Publishers Weekly

"While this is presented in the form of a manual, it is clear that what is truly important is not rigorously following a series of instructions but gardening from the heart, using fundamental design principles to inform one's plan and working with the site and conditions rather than trying to force them into obedience. Stunning color photographs depict the featured gardens and highlight smaller details within them. Thoroughly indexed and with a list of plants that appear in the book, this is a useful resource as well as a source of plentiful inspiration for readers." —Booklist

"A visually beautiful book to simply browse through one garden at a time […] impressively written, organized and presented. A source of inspiration, ideas, and practical instruction." —Midwest Book Review

"Inside Your Japanese Garden is a unique garden design guide. It teaches about an entire culture, with a snapshot into its history and customs, through gardening. It feels as inspirational as, yet more educational than, the average garden design book because of this deeper breadth of information. […] If you have any interest in Japanese aesthetics and culture, or just want a new way to view your garden, Inside Your Japanese Garden is sure to fill you with inspiration…" — Washington Gardener magazine

From the Publisher