LANDSCAPING: A Yen for Zen

Confronted with a twelve-acre property in Sharon, Connecticut, complete with airy, renovated barn-turned-home and spectacular views, Ruth Adams felt intimidated by the scope of the massive, hilly site. “What were my options for garden styles on this Berkshire mountaintop?” she recalls thinking when she and her late husband purchased the property in 1995. “I couldn’t do an English perennial border here, and I didn’t want to do a cottage garden.”

Having visited Japan ten years earlier, Adams was intrigued by the carefully choreographed landscapes of the temples, palaces, and public gardens in Kyoto, Nara, and Tokyo. She gradually began to draw inspiration from what she saw on that trip. “I admired the calculated informality I saw in those gardens, with their emphasis on simplicity and restraint,” she remembers.

Rather than adhere strictly to a Japanese plan, Adams cherry-picked various elements typical of traditional Japanese gardens, which often feature ponds, streams, waterfalls, bridges, islands, lanterns, basins, raked sand and pebbles, characteristic types of trees, shrubs and flowers, and concepts such as borrowed scenery, or shakkei.

“I never set out to create a Japanese garden—and I have not—but I studied the design principles and tried to interpret them in my landscape,” she explains. “I tried to follow Zen principles: identify with the pervading spirit of the site, use its strength, and balance the scale of various elements.”

Early in her garden-making days, Adams took cues from other Asian-style landscapes. “I was really struck by a Japanese garden at a stud farm in Ireland, when we visited our son-in-law’s family there. An Asian garden in Montreal was also a major influence,” she says. She took classes on Japanese gardens at the New York Botanical Garden and combed through books about Zen gardens, marking key passages with sticky notes. Another influence was a former college roommate and longtime friend, Fusako Cahill, a native of Japan. “When Fusako visited shortly after we moved here, she told me that trees were very important in Japanese gardens,” Adams says. “She suggested that I start by creating the garden’s ‘bones.’ So choosing and planting trees became my first focus.”

 One of Adams’s goals was to make the most of borrowed scenery. A key principle in Japanese gardens, the concept—to take advantage of natural and architectural landmarks that can be seen from the garden—is familiar to anyone, anywhere, whose home affords a scenic view of property he or she doesn’t own.

To “connect our undulating terrain with the distant mountain,” Adams says, she created a fifty-by-seventy-foot pond at the midpoint of a sloping hillside, visually linking the house and the lawn to the wider landscape. The pond, typical of the water features valued in Japanese gardens as symbols of purity and refreshment, adds sensory pleasure and reflects its surrounding.

A line of trees along a stone wall behind the pond was thinned to frame the vista. As a result, the pond looks like it “belongs” in the landscape and feels in scale with the existing natural elements and the large house.

Stones, another key element, were rescued from dilapidated farm walls on the property. Placed around the pond to appear anchored and naturalistic, these serve a practical function: to secure the pond’s liner. These boulders were softened by masses of ground-cover plants, including creeping sedums, junipers, and cotoneasters. Within these carpet-like sweeps, eye-catching plants stand out: standards of Juniperus procumbens ‘Nana’ and weeping varieties of trees such as Norway spruce and Eastern hemlock. Taller plants add heft and definition to the water scene without blocking the view. To connect the house with the water garden, a stone staircase descends from a bluestone terrace and merges with a steppingstone path that winds through the lawn.

This path meets a gracefully arched wooden bridge. Adams and the carpenter borrowed its design, called a soribashi, from an illustration in a book on Japanese gardens showing the classical Oriental form of the Chinese “full moon bridge.” As in a traditional Japanese setting, Adams’s bridge affords a glimpse of the colorful goldfish swimming below, of aquatic irises and water lilies, and of the tapestry of plantings surrounding the pond. It’s a favorite spot for her young grandchildren to help feed the fish.

At the far side of the bridge, a grass path leads to a series of garden beds and a “meditation garden” tucked among stones. Secondary paths lead to new areas and features at every turn. Here again, an air of restraint pervades the landscape, with strong statements from massed plantings that capitalize upon contrasts of foliage and texture, from grasses, sedums, dark-leaved Japanese maples, flowering shrubs such as rhododendron and azalea, and other species. “Massing is a form of minimalism, which is another principle in Japanese gardens,” explains Adams. “It was a crucial strategy that allowed me to deal with this large site.”

Adams’s minimalist approach was right at home outdoors and in keeping with her garden’s aesthetic inclinations. Aside from its scant, well-placed seating, there aren’t a lot of objects here. She prefers to rely on plantings for garden structure, rather than constructed elements, even if it sometimes takes years to achieve a specific effect. For example, an intriguing bower was created within a weeping katsura tree through careful pruning over several years. At one side of the house, Adams has been encouraging a pine tree to form a natural gateway to the garden. This painstaking, long-term approach is also typical of Asia: in the art of bonsai and larger-scale gardens, Japanese gardeners, over the years, carefully train and prune evergreens into the strong, gnarled forms that symbolize individuals who have stood the test of time.

Another feature in this Asian-inspired garden is its use of several varieties of clumping bamboo, popular in Japanese gardens for screening. Pine, bamboo, and flowering plum trees are oft-used companions, called the “three friends of winter” because they retain their foliage through the season and because, in Japan, the plum blooms when there is still snow on the ground. Adams’s garden contains this trio and celebrates the passing of the seasons, as Japanese gardens do, with other flowering trees, including native cherry along the edge of the property; perennials and bulbs; fall foliage in various hues, including red-leaved blueberries, native maples, and Japanese maples; and grasses and evergreens enhanced by snow in winter.

“For me, this landscape garden is all about the view,” Adams says. “I love watching how changing light and weather affect this vista hour by hour and from season to season.” [AUGUST 2009]

Virginia Small is the author of  Great Gardens of the Berkshires (Downeast, 2008), a collaboration with photographer Rich Pomerantz. A writer and editor, her work appears in Yankee, Garden Design, Horticulture, and Fine Gardening, where she formerly served as senior editor.

THE GOODS

Estate Care Landscaping Services
(Plant source and maintenance)
73 Sharon Mountain Rd.
Sharon, Conn.
860.364.5540