Kyoto Gardens

"Bring the art and beauty of Japan to your garden with inspiration from Kyoto Gardens." —HGTV Gardens Featuring beautiful Japanese garden photography and insightful writing, Kyoto Gardens is a labor of love from master photographer Ben Simmons and Kyoto-based writer Judith Clancy. In their rocks and plants, empty spaces and intimate details—Kyoto's gardens manifest a unique ability to provoke thought and delight in equal measure. These varied landscapes meld the sensuality of nature with the disciplines of cosmology, poetry and meditation. Japanese aristocrats created these gardens to display not just wealth and power, but cultural sensitivity and an appreciation for transcendent beauty. A class of professional gardeners eventually emerged, transforming Japanese landscape design into a formalized art. Today, Kyoto's gardens display an enormous range of forms—from rock gardens display of extreme minimalism and subtle hues, to stroll gardens of luscious proportions and vibrant colors. In Kyoto Gardens Simmons' photographs present a fresh and contemporary look at Kyoto's most important gardens. Their beauty is enhanced and humanized by gardeners tending the grounds using the tools of their art. Clancy's graceful text provides historic, aesthetic and cultural context to the Japanese gardens. Combining wonder and rigor, she describes how Kyoto's most beloved gardens remain faithful to their founders' creative spirit and conception. Journey to Kyoto's thirty gardens with just a turn of a page, or use the handy maps to plan your trip.

For all the damage that has occurred over the centuries, for all the relentless and destructive modernization still taking place today, Kyoto, imperial capital for more than a millennium, remains a rich, inexhaustible archive of Japanese cultural history. Houses and Gardens of Kyoto introduces a broad array of Kyoto's traditional houses from every period of the city's history. They range from summer villas to townhouses, from monumental Buddhist temples to insubstantial garden pavilions, from personal homes to traditional inns. All have their associated outdoor spaces, whether condensed courtyard gardens, picturesque stroll gardens, "dry landscape" stone gardens, or the "borrowed scenery" of distant landscapes. Both exquisite photo album and fascinating historical study, Houses and Gardens of Kyoto is sure to be the standard reference work on this topic for many decades to come.

Designed for the layman as well as the professional, this concise yet comprehensive guide provides both practical information and theoretical insights into the design of the Japanese garden. Kyoto, the capital of Japan for over one thousand years, possesses a richness of garden art without equal as a living chronicle of Japanese cultural history and environmental design. Following the introductory essays are individual entries for more than 50 temple and palace gardens. The text is augmented by an excellent selection of photographs, historical prints, maps, and color plates.

Displaying more than fifty gardens, from private dwellings to the Imperial Palaces and Villas, temples, tea schools and shrines. The elements and structure of each garden are explained by Masaaki Ono, who studied under the greatest twentieth-century garden designer, Mirei Shigemori. ForeWord Magazine's BOOK OF THE YEAR Awards, Silver Medal Winner, Home & Garden Supreme examples of the art of Japanese gardens, not easily accessible to the public. The Hidden Gardens of Kyoto is the attractive sequel to Landscapes for Small Spaces by the same

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This guidebook to the mecca of Japanese gardens provides all the detailednformation necessary to fully understand and appreciate the gardens of Kyoto,nd Japanese gardens in general.;The study begins with two chapters whichrovide the necessary background - "The Japanese Garden and Its Culturalontext" and "Making the Landscape of Kyoto". The main body of the bookescribes 56 of the most important Kyoto gardens, arranged in groups byocation. Each group is preceded by a map, or maps, showing the location ofhe gardens in that section of the city. The description of individualardens is preceded by basic facts, such as the name of the temple in whichhe garden is located, when the garden was created, and visiting information.escriptive texts examine the idiosyncrasies of each unique environment fromiverse perspectives, including design and content, spatial context andhilosophical and historical underpinning.