As unlikely as it might seem, the challenges of making gardens work in the desert resonates strongly with another distant and ancient gardening tradition. It’s no secret that gardeners and landscape designers who have an affinity for the natural beauty of the arid Southwest often find themselves drawn to the sensibilities of the Japanese garden. In fact, when it comes to a certain spirit and style in horticulture, it’s not all that far from New Mexico to Japan.
What the Southwestern landscape and the Japanese garden share is an emphasis on the direct experience of things as they are in nature. When visiting the classic Zen landscapes in Kyoto, the westerner’s first reaction is often “Where are the flowers?” The answer, of course, is that there aren’t any. Instead, Japanese gardens put the emphasis on the forms of nature - rocks, shrubs, trees, dry water features and understated structures - and not on masses of blooming perennials and annuals. Where “Western” gardens are virtually defined by their displays of ever-changing color, the prominence of organic materials like big stones, sculptural shrubs and trees, streambeds of dry gravel or sand, flagstone pathways and the play of sun and shadow are central to the Japanese garden. Additionally, Japanese gardens don’t change as rapidly as an English garden when it goes marching through the seasons. Time often passes slowly there. But just like the desert in spring, occasionally there is a sudden dramatic surprise. When a particular fruit tree or shrub bursts into bloom, the effect can be startling, as if a familiar sculpture has suddenly covered itself with colorful flowers.
The hallmarks of the Japanese garden ring true for the Southwestern landscape as well. Oriental notions blend seamlessly into the emerging landscape paradigms known variously as xeriscaping, permaculture or, more simply, as “regional style”. Each approach has its own special focus, but all center around the use of plants and materials that are either endemic or adapted to the local conditions, recreating a sense of the immediate surrounding environment and harmonizing with the prevailing climate of sun, water and soil. By featuring natural stones, dry arroyos, and planting native trees and shrubs, along with dramatically shaped plants like agave, yucca, or grasses, our desert gardens begin to echo the Japanese style.
Though it is possible, making a strictly Japanese-style garden here in the desert should not be our goal. Rather, we should seek to reinterpret the spirit of the oriental garden in our own local context. This spirit embraces the notion of creating a private, secluded refuge that simultaneously connects us with the larger outside environment. We can take a cue from the idea of consciously making unadorned natural objects more of a theme.
What’s more exciting, our desert gardens are poised to evolve beyond the Japanese prescription into a different kind of garden, one which successfully combines the Zen-like gravitas and quiet grace of sculptural elements with the exuberant, quirky colors and shapes of the desert. These “fusion gardens” as they are sometimes called, are something new, neither east nor west.
They tap into the strengths of both, combining our British-bred love of colorful flowers with oriental emphasis on the informal and organic. Anyone who has ever seen the desert bloom after a wet spring has experienced just this juxtaposition of harsh and lush. Annual wildflowers, strategically placed rock gardens, cacti, and select use of drought-adapted perennials all allow us to recreate this ephemeral glory in our own little oases. In these gardens, “traditional” elements such as turf lawns, geometric flowerbeds and containers are snuggled up near the house in a small oasis space or are omitted altogether. Water is frequently presented in the guise of a demure murmuring spring, a modest fountain, or better yet, simply suggested with a wash of sand and gravel in imitation of a dry streambed, to come and go with the summer storms.
All gardening requires patience, of course, and a willingness to participate in a certain kind of humility. It is an exercise in trial and error. The garden will tell us when we have put the right plants in the right place, if the rocks and trees sit comfortably where we’ve placed them. In this sense, the garden is much like an Alexander Calder mobile —- if we put the all the parts in just the right relation, “Viola,” it sings. It’s a sort of feng-shui. More often than not, these gardens are quiet, subtle, and contemplative. The Japanese garden is more akin to a shrine or a sacred space. Overall there is a sense of reverence for nature, and an absence of the artificial. The garden synchronizes with and amplifies the momentary and seasonal changes of the landscape from which it is made. Learning to blend and flow with nature in this way can result in a kind of aesthetic harmony and peacefulness which reminds us of our connection to the beauty and rhythm of the world around us - and isn’t that a wonderful thing for a garden to do?
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