Japanese Garden

(July 3, 2011) Over the years I’ve visited many Japanese gardens throughout Japan to the point I thought I had visited a pretty good percentage of the major gardens. I learned last fall I still have quite a way to go when I bought a Japanese garden calendar and found that I had visited only two of the twelve beautiful gardens shown. Actually there are hundreds of gardens throughout the country that are not particularly famous but are still beautiful. One from the calendar is a garden in the small village of Oshino which is not far from Mt. Fuji. A technique used in the design of some gardens is to use “borrowed scenery”  whenever there’s a nice scene beyond the boundary of the garden to give the impression the garden is larger than it actually is. The garden in Oshino uses a beautiful view of Mt Fuji as its borrowed scenery and it would be hard to have a better borrowed scene. The small village of Oshino is well off the beaten path for tourists and is so small it’s not even on my map of Japan but it has a beautiful garden. Maybe this means there are many beautiful gardens in many small villages across Japan, so I’ll never run out of new gardens to visit. There are several likely candidates for a visit on my calendar.