Comprising a Life
The Bonsai, Travels and Haiku of Vaughn Banting
Explanation of Middle Garden
In the traditional Japanese Garden everything leads away from the main house, or if it is a tea garden, the teahouse. To the Japanese, sighting a garden in an area un-associated with any primary structure is like a chicken without a head.
If there is to be a teahouse included somewhere in the garden layout, it must have its own separate garden; hence the term middle garden for the space between the main house and the tea garden .The middle garden , like the tea garden can be designed in any of the traditional Japanese garden styles.
There is usually is a roofed gate separating the middle garden from the teahouse garden. This indicates the beginning of a new mood or experience. It is usual to see a basin stone or other vessel, placed here with a bamboo dipper providing guests the opportunity for ceremonial cleansing before advancing into the tea garden and takeing part in the tea ceremony.
The tea garden is usually much smaller than the middle garden, as the teahouse is to the main house. The style in tea gardens can vary considerably depending upon what era they are designed to represent.
I refer to my own tea garden (the teahouse not yet constructed) as my " Zen Garden" because it is being constructed to represent a type of garden prevalent in Japan during the Kamakura period (14th-15th century) when Zen had its greatest influence on garden design.
This is the property soon after purchasing it. The first order of business was to remove a silver maple tree that didn't fit into my plans. I then demolished an existing brick barbecue pit that had been built in the 50s when they were so popular.
Same view much later showing "Middle Garden" with gates opened to the view of a developing Zen Garden and soon to feature a teahouse.
Before the space behind me became my Zen garden it held more finished examples of my bonsai collection; the hurried change in landscape use was brought by the onset of a series of malignant brain tumors which left me unable to attend to my trees.
These gates used to open into my old bonsai collection but now open into my developing the Zen garden.
The back of the house plastered and the existing concrete slab covered with broken flagstone but before poles were sheeved with giant bamboo
Back of house after faux rocks were created at the bases of the sheeved poles and after incorporating earlier planted trees into the final landscape plan
