Press: Islands in a Gravel Sea - A Taste of Japan at Kew featured in The Daily Telegraph

October 2021 | Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

We are thrilled to share that our contribution to Kew’s autumn festival has been highlighted by The Daily Telegraph (and the wider UK press). Writing for the Telegraph, Ambra Edwards described our Chalk Garden—a collaboration with landscape designer Otis Roberts—as the "high point of the festival".

A Thrilling Collaboration

Set within the northern octagon of the iconic Temperate House, the Chalk Garden was designed as a "cross-cultural breathing space." Amidst the jungle exuberance of the world's largest Victorian glasshouse, we introduced a spare, meditative aesthetic inspired by the Japanese tsubo niwa (courtyard garden).

Our design utilized sloped banks of British chalk pebbles to elevate acers to eye height, creating viewing corridors that interplay with the building’s delicate ironwork. The planting—a restrained palette of ferns, hostas, and Phyllostachys nigra—was chosen to emphasise the Japanese concept of Ma (the space between), allowing visitors to pause and focus on the present moment.

Islands in a gravel sea: a taste of Japan at Kew.

This month's festival is a treat not just for the eyes, but the ears too - it's the perfect place to sit back and contemplate.

The Daily Telegraph, by Ambra Edwards, 9 October 2021

Stepping into Kew's soaring Temperate House, it seems as if a flock of doves has flown in, and is circling the centre aisle of the glasshouse. Closer inspection reveals thousands of sheets of paper, each bearing a haiku in elegant Japanese calligraphy, suspended on a slender red thread.

This is the opening salvo in a new autumn festival running throughout October: a powerful symbolic rendering by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, of the essential connection between humankind and the natural world. The haiku (a poem of, typically, 17 syllables) makes reference to nature and the seasons, a theme that is amplified (literally) by an accompanying soundscape, created by Yosi Horikawa from sounds collected from the diverse natural landscapes of Japan - the waterfalls of Kagoshima, rustling cryptomeria forests, bird calls echoing across the waves of the Philippine Sea.

“The natural world is woven through Japanese culture in a unique, and tangible way”, says festival organiser Paul Denton. "Our festival celebrates that rich connection to nature through contemporary art, through music and crafts, and, of course, through plants.”

Last month, Kew achieved world-record status as the "largest collection of living plants at a single-site botanic garden", with 16,900 species of plants. Some 600 of this come from Japan, including many stalwarts of the English garden: hostas,and hydrangeas, wisteria and cherry trees, not to mention the azaleas and camellias, acers and bamboos we grow for their oriental glamour.

Less familiar, perhaps, are the tribe of Ophiopogons, grassy evergreens mass-planted to great effect in Kew's "Japanese Landscape", and the delicately spotted toad lily, Tricyrtis hirta, bringing puddles of soft, amethyst colour to the autumnal scene.

An autumn walk around Kew is always a pleasure, though Kew's tree guru, Tony Kirkham, is grumbling that our dismal summer has had a ruinous effect, and is praying for a cold snap to advance the autumn colour. As part of the festival, we are invited to join in the Japanese tradition of momijigari, or maple leaf hunting. Japan has a tradition of seasonal festivals, most famously the hanami, or flower-viewing festival, in early spring, when family and friends gather to admire the cherry blossom. But there are also festivals of snow and ice in winter, hydrangea festivals in summer, and the autumn festivals devoted to moon-viewing (tsukimi) and to celebrate the incomparable autumn foliage of Japanese acers. Kew's momijigari trail highlights both autumn colour and the many Japanese elements in the garden. Among them is the Japanese Landscape, one of the hidden gems at Kew, a little off the beaten track to the Pagoda: this is built around another architectural gem: the Chokushi-Mon, or Gateway of the Imperial Messenger.

This replica of a temple gate in Kyoto was a star exhibit at the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910. Liberally adorned, with frisky, curly-maned lions, it stands on a mound, overlooking a series of gardens presenting aspects of Japanese garden making. The Garden of Peace, with its stepping-stone path, recreates the contemplative mood of the Japanese tea garden; the Garden of Activity demonstrates the Japanese mastery of rockwork, with artful arrangements of rocks and stones evoking mountains and waterfalls, and "islands", joined by stone bridges, set in a gravel "sea". Between them, a Garden of Harmony recalls the mountains of Japan: the supreme art of the Japanese garden is to distil the beauty of the natural world into the confined space of the garden.

The same serene spirit rules over the Minka House, a Japanese farmhouse with thatched roof and sliding wooden wall panels, hidden in the midst of a bamboo garden, where dozens of species, from lofty golden, black and olive wands of Phyllostachys to knee-high thickets of Pleioblastus, are corralled in rhizome-limiting rings to stop them galloping away. Here, on the shady, broad veranda, one might easily spend tranquil hours in contemplation.

The Japanese architect Yuichi Kodai has brought something of that spare aesthetic to Kew, in a thrilling collaboration with the landscape designer Otis Roberts, which is, for me, the high point of the festival. In the northern octagon of the Temperate House, they have created a cross-cultural garden: a calm, light-filled breathing space amid the jungle exuberance of the glasshouse.

The starting point for their Chalk Garden is the Japanese courtyard garden or tsubo niwa. Traditionally made between buildings in temples and palaces, or to bring light and cooling air into city dwellings, these gardens were designed as artistic installations to be enjoyed from the surrounding rooms. Here, visitors pass between two sloped banks of chalk pebbles, which raise the star plants (a pair of handsome acers) to eye height. Extending at the diagonal are simple lines of larger rocks and long islands of planting, arranged to offer a pleasing "front and back" from every perspective. Here careful plant choice plays its part, as with Anemone Ruffled Swan, which has a white face but a lilac-blue back to the petals.

As visitors move through the space, the intervals between the plantings create viewing corridors to direct the eye to glimpses of green outside, while the graceful fronds of Phyllostachys nigra reaching skywards create a delightful interplay with the delicate ironwork of the building. Planting is simple cmd and almost entirely green: ferns and grasses, Pachysandra terminalis, a handful of hostas, a single Equisetum placed in a small black reflective pool.

"We wanted to create a garden where you could pause, and draw breath”, explains Otis, "a contemplative space where you could focus on the moment, that would free your mind to think about whatever you want to think.”

British-born Otis admires the spaciousness and simplicity of the Japanese garden. "I used to enjoy lots of colour and incident, but as I got older I started to pare back. Life is busy and a garden is part of your life, so it can be nice to go to a place that's not shouting for your attention.”

Yuichi, on the other hand, is delighted by the more flowery English style. "The Zen garden is very intense. Many Japanese prefer the gentler, more relaxed English garden, which gives more opportunity to engage with plants and combinations of plants, celebrating their flowers, leaves and colours.” The unraked chalk and "fuzzy" planting are his concessions to Western softness.

Western gardeners have so much to learn from the Japanese tradition, insists Otis. Maybe Covid has opened our eyes a little: we learnt to slow down, to look and listen with attention, to appreciate the transient beauty of the seasons - all familiar concepts in Japanese culture. "Why do we rush to cut the dead leaves from a plant? There's a beauty in senescence. And we need to enlarge our idea of what a garden can be.” That, he believes, is a place not so much to do as to be, a place of mental and spiritual refreshment.

"We're always rushing, and in our gardens, all too often, we just rush to follow the latest trend - right now, prairie planting and the naturalistic garden,” Otis says. But curiously, these gardens, for all that they are so different in appearance from anything Japanese, may in many ways come closer to capturing their essential spirit.

At first sight, this may seem paradoxical. The modern, ecological garden in the west is plant-rich and plant-focused, whereas, despite the spectacular diversity of the Japanese flora (Japan is one of the 36 global biodiversity hotspots), Japanese gardens use a relatively s1nall palette of plants. Our sustainable, meadowy gardens are left as far as possible to their own devices, whereas even the smallest Japanese garden requires intensive maintenance. Yet their elaborate artistry, their patient pursuit of perfection, go hand in hand with the acceptance of entropy, death and decay: celebrating the passage of the seasons, the blooming and fading of each cherished flower. Is this not what we are belatedly learning to do in our new(ish) gardens of grasses and seed heads? In seeking to garden in harmony with nature, rather than to dominate or deny it, we begin to approach the reverence for nature that infuses every aspect of Japanese culture.

This reverence is founded, of course, on a profound respect for nature's power, for Japan is a country of typhoon and tstunami, earthquakes and volcanoes. The artistry that goes into revealing the sculptural form of an acer, or training a young pine to look old and gnarled, does not seek to subdue nature (a risible notion in a land so beset by natural disasters), but to make the living form more perfectly itself, to coax out its essential natural form.

According to ancient Japanese Shinto tradition, divine spiritual power infuses living and inanimate objects, from people and plants to rivers and rocks; thus man is not the ruler of the universe, placed somehow apart or above, but merely part of the universal continuum.

Beneath the razzmatazz of Kew's Japan festival - calligrapher-dancers, musicians and dazzling floral displays - is an invitation to think more deeply: if we could abandon, in our gardens at least, the Western illusion that we are separate from our surroundings, and accept with humility our place in the natural world, surely that would be more authentically Japanese than any number of stone lanterns.

Lessons from Japan

Western designers have found inspiration in Japan since the 1930s, when the minimalist asymmetry of the gardens inspired the modernists. The Canadian landscape designer Christopher Tumnard suggested looking to Japan for gardens that would work with modern architecture, while Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, suggested that the famous Zen garden of 15 rocks at Ryoanji had already perfected, by the 13th century, all the modernists were seeking to achieve.

Forget the stone lanterns or red painted bridges we have come to associate with Japanese gardens, suggest Otis Roberts and Yuichi Kodai: they are meaningless outside their cultural context. Instead, concentrate on the essentials:

Think of your garden as an art form

In Japan, the boundaries between creative disciplines are much more fluid, so graphic designers, artists, and architects all bring their insights to bear on garden design, opening up new possibilities

Don't try to boss your garden

Instead, invite it to let you open your mind

Be bold

In both design and plant selection, don't lose clarity, or let your ideas be diluted. The hardest part is not introducing too many plants

Less is more

What is not there is as important as what is - the gaps between the forms of a cloud pruned tree, the presence that is implied by absence, the space for imagination to rove

Embrace the moment

Enjoy letting things go through their seasons of change

The Japanese have been growing chrysanthemums since the eighth century, developing them from the simple daisy-flowered species that arrived fro1n China into myriad forms so magnificent, that the flower became, from the late 12th century, a symbol of imperial glory. Every autumn, on the ninth day of the ninth month, the Japanese celebrate Kiku no Sekku, or Chrysanthemum Day, with floral displays and horticultural competitions - a tradition honoured at Kew with a dazzling display of 3,000 potted chrysanthemums in six varieties*, carpeting an entire section of the Temperate House.

Display organiser Corin Golding gives his tips on how to keep them looking good:

+ Pot into free-draining compost with plenty of organic matter

+ Keep in full sun or partial shade

+ Feed regularly throughout the summer with a high potash feed

+ Deadhead, deadhead, deadhead!

+ Maintain a careful watering regimen: NEVER overwater ALWAYS water from the base. This will encourage strong rooting while keeping both the foliage and the surface of the compost dry will help to avoid fungal disease