Ambiguities
Bonsai trees resemble some sculpture in being three-dimensional but reduced to
two-dimensionality by display in a particular favored position, with the viewer prevented
from walking around or touching them. Placing bonsai in a garden restores three-dimensionality
by creating relationships of depth and distance to other features: the bonsai are pressed back
into the 3-D world from which they were removed. And yet a Japanese garden like mine—primarily
a meditative rather than a strolling garden—is usually viewed from outside, "framed" by architectural
features. In this case, even as stepping stones lead the eye into it, the garden is reduced to two
dimensions when seen through the doorway and large windows of a porch. While some of this perceptual
play between two and three dimensions occurs in other gardens, it is enhanced in a garden containing bonsai.
The dimensional ambiguities continue with the pond, where the surface appears two-dimensional.
Short of diving into the water, the viewer has few clues that this is not a trompe l'oeil of
visual technology. Given the proliferation of flora—land, bog, and aquatic—it is difficult to see
where the land ends and the water begins. Some aspects of the pond, of course, can be viewed only by
physically entering the garden: the koi in its depths belie the surface flatness (frames 3, 4, 7, 8).
Perspective can be realized by means of a vanishing point, in which farther objects
appear smaller, or it can be reversed. In my garden, this is the most obvious and intricate instance
of ambiguity, and is clearest when the garden is viewed from the porch. On the far side of the pond,
for example, the large stones increase in size—reverse perspective—as they recede from the viewer
(left to right in frame 3, a side view). The lanterns on two sides of the pond are identical except
for their size, but they appear to be the same size because the larger one is farther away (frame 2, rear).
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The small raft bonsai on the stone across the pond, the only bonsai still in a pot in the garden, gives
the illusion of a distant forest, the effect of vanishing-point perspective exaggerated by its bonsai scale (frame 3).
Viewed from the porch, a line of trees increases in size with distance, reversing perspective: beyond the
small hinoki forest (frame 9) is the primary Japanese maple forest
(frames 1, 2, 3, 10), then the larger red
Japanese maple, followed by the nine-foot trident in front of the garage. The bamboo along the east side of
the garden (frame 5, rear) also increases in size from front to back. (Current photos don't show entire lines
of perspective, but elements within them.)
Vanishing-point perspective is apparent between the redwood in the foreground (frame 9, left),
the primary Japanese maple forest, and the large hinoki forest (frame 3, right center; 6). This
gentle arch is picked up at the back of the garden by the round zelcova (Japanese elm) at the corner
of the garage and supported by the declining tree height along the garage (east to west). The primary
Japanese maple forest serves as a fulcrum in balancing the tension between vanishing-point and reverse
perspective.
As the garden continues to grow and change, its artistic nature is tied as much to the hand that
maintains it as to the hand that made it. Unlike artworks that bestow quasi-immortality on their
maker, particularly in Western thinking, the garden is likely to die with me. In its transience
it is more like a musical performance than a plastic, compositional, or literary work. Its transience
and fragility bear out the Japanese aesthetic concepts of wabi and sabi, which connote
rusticity, simplicity, and a surrender to natural devolution. Other elements of Japanese aesthetics
expressed in the garden are asymmetry and non-linearity.
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