Japan for Garden Lovers & Plant Travelers

About this book

Japan is the world's great garden civilisation, and also its most seasonal: the cherry keeps a fortnight, the wisteria a storm's mercy, the lotus a morning's hours. This guide gives the garden lover and plant traveller 200 complete journeys, each built as a working method: the garden case for the scene, exactly how the journey is built around it, its season and timing with its fallback, and the manners owed to the garden, its gardeners and the strangers on its paths. The bloom calendar read like a chart, Kyoto's temple circuits and the three great gardens as journeys, the cities' green rooms, the whole flower year from February plum to November chrysanthemum, Hokkaido's flower roads and Oze's boardwalks, night gardens and rain gardens, and a full handbook of gate names, plant-label kanji and guest manners. Bloom, hours and fees change, so none are asserted as fixed facts; every entry names the official source for its subject — while the durable part, how to plan, arrive, pivot and behave in any Japanese garden, is guaranteed in full.