A Little Bit of Our History

by William Will

Meditations on the Japanese Garden is an online community for those interested in all aspects of the Japanese garden. Published online on a rolling schedule it brings articles about garden history, design and maintenance to an audience of professionals and laymen. With sections about travel, books and a community forum it is a place to exchange personal experiences, information and opinions about the Japanese garden. Editor-In-Chief William Will shares his motivations for creating this new community.

When putting together this site, my goal was to make Japanese gardens more accessible to people with an interest in Japanese culture and gardening. The site chronicles my personal journey, from my first exposure to Japanese gardens as a child, my years of studying landscape architecture and operating a landscaping business, to recent visits to Kyoto, Japan.

Over the years I’ve met many people with an interest in the gardens of Japan, as part of tour groups or as part of the many communitites that engage in Bonsai, Ikebana or other traditional Japanese arts. They all share a common sense for the beauty found in these gardens, and in the importance of that beauty to their lives and to being human. I wanted to create a place where those people can meet, if not physically, then virtually, to share some of their perspectives.

My story of involvement with Japanese gardens is not really that different from most peoples. My first encounter with the Japanese garden was many years ago as a child at the age of 10. I remember sitting over one older book I found in our local library in Williston Park, N.Y., studying the fine ink drawings and black and white photographs, fascinated and drawn inextricably to the beauty I then saw in my minds eye.

Over the years I continued to snatch up books on the subject, first in Germany, where I spent my high school and college years, and later back in the States. The quality of the images in books improved over the years, as well as the scholarship involved with the subject in general. After moving to San Francisco 10 years ago, I finally had more and more access to Japanese culture in general, including exposure to a wealth of publications at the local Kinokunya bookstore, food and the traditional tea ceremony.

A chronic illness forced me to retire from my careers in landscaping and computers in the mid nineties. On the upside of things, I’ve been afforded the luxury of pursuing some of the threads of my life that I had abandoned in earlier years, either for financial reasons or due to mere circumstances. One of those threads has been my devotion to Japanese gardens and the creation of this community.

Although I’ve seen a number of so-called Japanese gardens in the United States and Europe, I’ve always considered them to be lacking in some way or the other. I think this is mainly due to the different cultural context, and the lack of the Japanese buildings, which are an integral part in how we relate to a garden. Many of the public Japanese gardens outside of Japan were built as showcases, combining as many design elements as possible, insted of focussing on a few simple elements.

Life events kept me from actually visiting Japan until later in life, when I spent time in some of the gardens I had studied and dreamed of over the years. That is when I started collecting most of the impressions and material on this site. I continue to take trips back to the Kyoto area as often as I can. It is a personal journey, and I’m not quite sure where it will take me.