It strikes me that in Japanese culture there is a great and sensitive understanding of the life, or the spirit, of stone. I was struck by that as I wandered through a couple of Japanese gardens recently. You just don’t see rocks like these in UK gardens, and there’s something about them which makes you SEE them when you might never have been used to seeing rocks before. Take a look at these examples and see if they change the way you notice stone over the next few days.
OK – got a bit ahead of myself there, with my comment on your last post! But what about the gravel? Been looking at some photos on Wikipedia of gardens at Kyoto and other places in Japan – very few plants of any description, just a few rocks, and a virtual sea of very fine, silvery gray sand or gravel, which has been painstakingly raked into all sorts of lovely patterns, some like a rippling sea breaking up against the rocks, another one like an infinitely extended chessboard. I simply can’t grasp the skill, patience or imagination that goes into designing and building these gardens – totally beyond me. Do you see many of these gardens on your trips to Japan?
Ah, yes, funnily enough I deliberately DIDN’T upload any of those ones for this post! I do think those “dry” gardens are very special. The only one I know well is the famous zen garden in the Temple of The Peaceful Dragon – Ryoan-ji. It’s actually undergoing maintenance at the moment so my photos of it are not the best you could see but you can read more about it here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%8Dan-ji