A designer of Japanese gardens contemplates wildness, humanity, beauty, the liquid state of the world.
From his vantage point as a garden designer and writer based in Kyoto, Marc Peter Keane examines the world around him and delivers astonishing insights through an array of narratives. How the names of gardens reveal their essential meaning. A new definition of what art is. What trees are really made of. The true meaning of the enigmatic torii gate found at Shinto shrines. Why we give flowers as gifts. The essential, underlying unity of the world.
Foreword
Magnitudes
The name of the willow
Wild in the city
Interfaces
Karesansui
Of arcs and circles
Little secrets everywhere
Flowers
Art
Confluences
Wind in the trees
Waste not
Dissolving
Dream garden
Unity
Symmetry
Rivers of the mind
The last god
Paths
Subtleties
On torii gates
Wheels turning
A garden by any other name
Emptiness