China and Japan Around the World in 80 Gardens

I believe that a really good way to understand a culture is through its gardens.

This is an extraordinary journey to visit 80 inspiring gardens from all over the world.

Some are very well known, like the Taj Mahal or the Alhambra.

And I'm also challenging my idea of what a garden actually is.

So I'm visiting gardens that float on the Amazon, a strange fantasy in the jungle,

as well as the private homes of great designers,

and the desert flowering in a garden.

And wherever I go I shall be meeting people that share my own passion for gardens

on my epic quest to see the world through 80 of its most fascinating and beautiful gardens.

This week my journey to see the world through its gardens

takes me to the imperial nations of the Far East.

I have long admired the Zen gardens of Japan and knew that they in turn were derived from China.

But the deeply spiritual approach to every tiny detail of these gardens

was one that I had tried hard to understand in the past,

but I confess that, like most westerners, I found them beautiful, but baffling.

There's a door there somewhere, but I don't know how to open it.

Seeing this makes me hungry to know more.

I really want to go beyond and get inside the garden,

or maybe just let the garden get inside me.

I do really want to try and make sense of the Japanese Zen garden.

So the destination of my journey is taking me towards

the most famous examples of Zen in the Buddhist temples of Kyoto.

But I'm starting out much further west, and effectively, much further back in time in China.

As one of the world's great civilisations, China's religion and art

has influenced the history of the entire Far East,

and the expression of art and spirituality within gardens began here.

My first port of call is Suzhou, 45 miles west of Shanghai.

Suzhou is an ancient city famous for its fine silks

and the network of canals built two millennia ago to transport them.

It also has a reputation for having the finest collection of historic gardens in the whole of China.

Suzhou has been an important city in China

throughout its long and incredibly complicated history.

But it came to prominence

in the so-called Spring and Autumn Period, about 450 years BC,

when Confucius was developing Confucianism, a system of

thought and behaviour that still influences people to this day.

And then 1,800 years later, that's about 1400 in our own time,

during the Ming dynasty, it became particularly known for its gardens.

It was during this period that Suzhou was the bureaucratic centre

for imperial China, and its gardens flourished.

Many of these were commissioned by scholars and the highly cultured men of the imperial civil service,

who practised Taoism, a religion that reveres nature and encourages people to build gardens.

I'm beginning by visiting the one that is reckoned to be the greatest of all southern Chinese gardens.

This is the best known and biggest garden in Suzhou,

and the fact that it's called the Humble Administrator's Garden is

a direct clue to the Chinese approach to gardens and life.

The garden was created in the 16th century by a retired tax collector named Wang Xianchen,

who wanted, not unreasonably, to create a garden that was exquisitely beautiful.

But, as a Taoist, he respected nature and harmony

above a display of his wealth and status, so he added the word "humble"

to the title of his garden.

Of course, the humility of the title doesn't refer to the garden,

but to the suitably humble and very rich Wang Xianchen.

In fact the garden is very grand and attracts vast numbers of visitors.

At 7.30 in the morning the doors open

and the crowds pour in.

3,000 visitors a day, every day into the garden, and they're all in tour groups

led by leaders with microphones, so it becomes an extraordinary place.

The crowds are pouring in because this is the quintessential classical Chinese garden.

Every element of it is intended to be viewed as a work of art

that captures the fleeting essence of nature.

So, against the backdrop of white walls, the garden becomes a series of calligraphic paintings,

and every window and door is placed to frame a seemingly natural yet highly manicured scene.

The pavilions and buildings in the garden aren't just summer houses.

It's a strolling garden, and the idea was that you walk to the buildings

to do calligraphy, play music, read poetry,

and this one, which is one of my favourites, has a view for each of the seasons.

So this would be for summer, with the water filed with lotus flowers.

And this one for autumn, with moonlight on the bamboos.

And then in winter, the snow would collect on the tiles.

And finally, this would represent spring and its freshness.

So you would get the inspiration of each of the seasons

to write or read at the table.

All tied in with the architecture itself.

Everywhere throughout the garden there are these circular moon gates,

which symbolise heaven and perfection with Earth beyond them

and also on a basic aesthetic level

they have the most wonderful curves that they introduce to the garden,

and you see those curves picked up in the lines of the plants and trees and the branches beyond.

So you have this lovely rhythm running right through the garden.

Water is an element that is central to all Chinese gardens

and like Suzhou itself, with its labyrinth of canals,

this is a garden of buildings buttressed by water.

But plants, too, play a significant role, although they are invariably loaded with symbolism.

There are three plants that the Chinese call The Three Friends of Good Character.

The pine, because it has strength and is long lived,

the winter plum, because it dares to flower when nothing else will

and the bamboo, because it grows tall, upright and is steadfast.

However, there are far more rocks than plants in the garden.

They're mounted on plinths like statues, or presented on tables for close appreciation.

The stone here in the Humble Administrator's Garden

is clearly really dominant

and most of it is placed in such a way

as they occupy the space around them.

And they hold great significance and poise

and they clearly are saying something.

The trouble is, I don't know what they're saying.

So I need an interpreter who will translate for me the language of Chinese rocks.

I've arranged to meet Mr Wei, who will do the rock speak,

and Joe, who will do the Chinese part.

Between them they explain to me the significance of stones in the Chinese garden over a glass of tea.

If you visit Chinese gardens you will see rocks everywhere

because the reason for beauty in a garden for the Chinese is related to nature.

HE SPEAKS CHINESE

If you look from that direction to here, it's completely just like a mountain shape

and they are sweet peaks.

Each of Mr Wei's rocks sit on its own specially carved pedestal.

The stones not only look like mountains.

They look like animals, like birds, like human beings, like people.

SPEAKS CHINESE

Looks like calligraphy.

It's just like a painting. Like itself, like painting.

So it's old trees without leaves.

So he said that I will make a joke of your guys.

I myself giving these stones name. It's called Westerners.

The biggest difference between Westerners and Chinese people is the nose.

The Westerner has very big nose.

And then very deep eyes beside.

Yes, I can see that!

SPEAKS CHINESE

Mr Wei then made what I think was a joke.

He said that if it didn't resemble an Englishman then perhaps it would pass for a German.

No, I didn't get it either.

But what or whoever they look like, these stones are valued because they are completely natural.

We want to leave some space for the imaginations.

That's the Chinese thinking of beauty - not clear.

They don't like to see all the things in one time.

I'm beginning to learn that here in China hints and suggestions

are considered better guides than obvious directions.

As Mr Wei put it, in every work of art

there should be space for the mind to travel between like and dislike.

He suggested to me that before I leave Suzhou I should visit a nearby garden that is given over entirely

to the celebration of rocks and stone.

The Lion Grove Garden was built in 1342 and is the oldest Buddhist temple garden in Suzhou.

Once inside the main gate I then enter a series of small courtyards

amongst beautiful buildings filled with work celebrating the natural world in every guise.

The source of inspiration for the gardens

is exactly the same one as you see in the paintings and calligraphic poems.

It's always the countryside,

the natural...the trees and, brilliantly, just slices of tree,

and then here, amazingly, is probably the most valuable thing of the lot,

which is just a slab of marble, but it's revered because it looks like a watercolour of mountains.

And that, to me, makes more sense to me than anything else because you realise

this happy accident of things that are just hinted at.

That makes sense, to me, of the gardens and of paintings.

And this marvellous, fantastic panel

just of the tops of trees.

In true Chinese oblique fashion, The Lion Grove Garden was

originally created to look like a mountain that looked like a lion.

gnarled, pitted and contorted rocks pile on top of each other

and every one is supposed to resemble a lion or some part of its anatomy,

although at times I had to peer hard to see a likeness.

Now, what...I'm supposed to do to get the most out of this garden

is to let myself go, to try to lose myself in it.

And I think that's meant literally

so that gradually you get confused, you feel lost, displaced, disorientated

and then when your self disappears, you become one with nature.

And that way the garden will reveal itself as a spiritual experience.

The crowds and the noise are fairly unspiritual, but I'll give it a go.

This kind of garden is known as a 'stroll garden',

with its winding path representing the Buddhist road to enlightenment.

Oh, look. I wasn't expecting that.

How bizarre is that?

This deeply surreal landscape is made from limestone dredged from the bottom of a local lake,

and was created by a Buddhist monk whose teacher, according to Mr Wei,

who told me the story, rode a lion to the site of the garden

where it promptly lay down and refused to move.

Then it shook its mane and the hairs flew out,

and when they touched the ground each one turned into a lion cub.

And the monks felt that this was a very auspicious thing,

so they created this Lion's Grove garden

with all these lions growing out of the stone, to celebrate that.

All plants are carefully trained and pruned

to mimic the weather-beaten trees of the wild,

and, despite the odd splash of yellow jasmine, the effect is overwhelmingly grey.

It's like bone on a shore that's been bleached by sea and sun.

But it's not dreary at all.

The monochrome is actually rather good.

It looks like a nice black and white picture.

To my very western eye, this is a wonderfully kitsch extravaganza

whose seed, visually at least, falls from the same plant as the Victorian stumpery or the Georgian Grotto.

It is odd, baroque and culturally confusing.

If I seem slightly less than enthusiastic about this garden it's not because I don't like it,

it's bafflement more than anything else.

Thinking about what Mr Wei was saying about stones,

how that they're valued because they suggest the natural world.

They hint at it.

I think the next place that I need to go is the natural world itself

and go out into the Chinese countryside

in order that I can understand these gardens a bit better.

So next morning I take a bus trip 70 miles west

to the city of Huangshan in Anhui Province,

an area revered by Chinese artists for its natural beauty.

I visit the old neighbourhood of Tungshi

and meet up with a local guide named Johnson

who told me that the area is famous for its calligraphers and watercolour painters.

He introduces me to a highly acclaimed local artist whose work is directly inspired

by the same landscape that I've come to see.

Chinese gardens seems to have been inspired by paintings.

Perhaps you can tell me a bit about this.

TRANSLATION: The garden, according to my understanding,

is a kind of wish by people to have a better environment.

For example, in Suzhou

some of the gardens were designed first by the painters...

and thus they are closely related.

One of the very important guidelines of Chinese painting

is the harmony between nature and the human beings.

The same is true with the gardens.

And, for example, this is just an ordinary pine tree, right?

Actually, this pine tree is nationwide famous tree.

It's called the Welcoming Guest Pine.

Just like you meet an old friend who's give you a big hug.

And we'll find almost the same element in the Chinese gardens.

So there seems to be a clear line from Huangshang

to the art to the gardens.

I agree with you 100%.

So, if the ancient gardens were inspired by even older paintings of a particular landscape

that remains a profound inspiration to artists to the present day, I had to go and see it for myself.

These are the Yellow Mountains - a range with 77 peaks in its 60 square miles.

It's amazing to see the way the trees are growing out of solid rock.

Look at that tree - it's exactly like the trees pruned in the gardens in Souzhou.

That is the effect they are going for with such art and care reproducing it.

That explains everything.

Ooh! Ooh, ooh, ooh!

How about that?

That's as staggering a piece of landscape as I've ever seen in my life.

You see... You see the paintings

and you see the gardens and they, they seem to be...

a caricature almost. Almost a cartoon image of mountains.

Then you realise you haven't seen the half of it. That's it.

Blimey, blimey, blimey.

This pine is the welcome pine that's in Mr Yu's painting.

This scene with the sets going up, it's exactly what he's painted.

If you want to understand the gardens, you have to come here,

which makes it a bit tricky for the average garden visitor,

but that's the way it has to be, I think.

Oh, wow! Look at that tree.

You see, seeing it growing out of a rock like that,

immediately I understand what they call Penjing here in China,

or Bonsai in Japan.

The sort of stunted growth that is probably hundreds of years old.

Completely makes sense of why they go to such trouble

to reproduce that and why they're so valuable.

They're called the Yellow Mountains, because in the 8th century,

it was thought the Yellow Emperor Xuanyuan became an immortal here.

So as well as being beautiful, this landscape

inspires right mindedness and spiritual purity.

All these padlocks.

Rather bizarre, strung out in swags like this.

But there's a rather sweet story behind them.

Lovers come here with this fantastic view,

and they put a padlock on with both their names engraved onto the padlock,

lock it and throw away the key, and the union can't be broken

until they find that same key and unlock the padlock.

And it's a hell of a drop down there, so it's a big commitment.

When you come up here and see this for yourself, you realise instantly

why this has had such a profound influence on Chinese art and culture.

To look back up at the mountains and know this is here

would be like treasure. And you'd want to capture it,

you'd want to paint it all your life, want to make a garden

that held that secret of this place, because it is magical.

I've never seen anything like it on this planet.

My visit to the Yellow Mountains has provided me with a key to unlock Chinese gardens.

And now, before I go on to my destination in Japan,

I want to visit perhaps the grandest of them all.

So I head north to the Chinese capital Beijing.

Beijing is a city that has seen much change and turmoil

over the centuries, including warring imperial dynasties,

a Japanese invasion in WWII and the Cultural Revolution of the '60s,

when the Communist Government, under Chairman Mao,

systematically destroyed much of the country's cultural heritage.

I was 21 when Mao died and so, I was a boy and a teenager throughout the Cultural Revolution.

And the thought of visiting China then was impossible,

it was so remote and rather a frightening hostile place

and although it was 30 years ago now, it seems like yesterday.

So just to be here is astonishing!

Today, China is going through a very different cultural revolution,

one of intense industrialisation and massive economic growth.

With the city hosting the 2008 Olympics,

the entire country has become much more accessible for tourists,

and this is why I can easily come here to visit one of China's most spectacular gardens.

The reason why I've chosen to come to this particular garden is because I want to see

if that line that, to me, was so clear from the Yellow Mountains

to the gardens of Suzhou runs to the Imperial Gardens.

After all, Imperial China was the dominant force.

You can't ignore that, whether you're talking about gardens or any other aspect of China.

In fact, come through the gate, the first thing I see

is a rock with pine branches coming down.

Straight from the Yellow Mountains, I think.

The New Imperial Summer Palace is the largest imperial garden in China.

It was built just outside the city, as the summer retreat for the imperial family,

away from the heat and noise of the Forbidden City right in the middle of Beijing.

In the 21st century, that retreat is now visited

by over five million visitors, mostly Chinese, every year.

My first impression of this on this pearly winter's morning is absolutely beautiful!

A lovely place. But it is vast and I bought, on my way in, a map.

So I think I need to get my bearings.

Ooh, the stone's cold. Let me just see.

If I put my notebook on there... OK, here we are.

I am there and, you can see, that's just one tiny part.

The garden is 700 acres big, at least,

of which the lake is three-quarters.

So you can see that, compared to the Suzhou gardens,

it's unimaginably vast. Um... But I've got all day.

The first garden was made here in the beginning of the 12th century,

about 50 years after the Norman conquest of England,

and it is an accretion of over 800 years of use and misuse.

Big in space, time and concept.

This bridge spans the canal that Kublai Khan built

to link the palace to the Forbidden City.

And the emperor would have come from the Forbidden City, down the canal,

which looks pretty worldly, under this extraordinary bridge

and enter the fairyland and magical space of the palace.

Like the gardens of Suzhou,

the Summer Palace was built on Buddhist and Taoist beliefs.

But everything is on an almost unimaginably grand scale, especially the lake.

This was enlarged in the Qing Dynasty,

round about 1750, by the Emperor Qianlong,

who employed 10,000 labourers to dig it out and turn it into a peach shape

to celebrate his mother's 60th birthday.

The peach being a Chinese symbol of longevity.

With the spoil from the lake, he created three islands

which represent famous mythical mountains.

And to the side, he heightened a mound and named that Longevity Hill,

again to symbolise long life on this Earth and after death.

Well, this is it. This is the big viewpoint to see the whole garden,

except, for the day that I come to see the garden, there's a thick fog.

The cold air, thick with pollution, might not have been healthy,

but it did give the Summer Palace a ghostly beauty.

Sun would have made it all too tangible.

What I can't see, I don't know. What I can see

looks exactly like some of the paintings

showing the mountains just coming out of the cloud.

In the 19th century, a long corridor was built

to view the garden in wet weather,

and it's covered in an altogether less ethereal art.

And it's 728 metres long,

with 273 of these individual sections,

with this idea that every single section frames a view.

And all the way along, it's painted.

There are over 8,000 paintings, each one of which is telling a story.

Now, clearly, a 700-acre garden

can't be encapsulated in a single visit,

especially if it's shrouded in enveloping haze.

But the impression of it is unforgettable,

even if that is made up of snatched glimpses through the mist.

You know, in a way, I'm glad that it's been

such a grey, wintry day on my visit to the Summer Palace,

because, all day long, the sky and the water have merged

and the bare branches and the reflection and the silhouette of the buildings

have created that kind of accidental beauty,

which seems to me the essence of what is trying to be achieved in Chinese gardens

and that's been a big revelation for me.

I feel it has equipped me much better now to go to Japan

and see the way they have developed their gardens from the same influences,

but on parallel lines, to arrive at a slightly different place.

So I'm off. Heading east this time.

Bound for Kyoto in Japan to see some of its gardens

with the fresh experience of China hopefully equipping me

to come closer to the bewildering but beautiful emptiness of Zen.

And although the Chinese influence was profound and initiated gardening in Japan,

the Japanese took what they wanted from it and quickly developed their own distinct style.

If you want to see the great Zen gardens, then Kyoto is where you have to go.

It was founded in 794, when Buddhism,

one of those key new influences, was flourishing in China.

Kyoto was the imperial city and capital of Japan until 1868,

as well as the cultural and artistic heart of the country,

where the high arts of theatre, music and gardening were widely practised.

Kyoto is known for its wonderful range of gardens,

many of which are genuinely ancient and venerable.

But you arrive in...a big, very contemporary bustling city,

which, of course, there's no reason why it shouldn't be,

but, er, it's not quite what I had imagined.

However, there are over 2,000 temples and shrines here today,

almost all of which have gardens. But in this densely populated city,

which is squeezed between the mountains,

buildings and gardens are scaled right down.

Not an inch of space is wasted and even the tiniest nooks and crannies

are all planted up in exquisite detail.

Look at this. A little garden with a pond and, look, goldfish.

Goldfish in a pond on the street just outside the shop and it overflows into the drain.

Such attention to detail.

It's charming.

There are still indications of the Chinese influences everywhere.

Pine trees, the Chinese symbol of strength and longevity, are common,

pruned and trained to the last pine needle.

This pine, with it's very carefully trained head,

seems beautiful, but not that significant,

until your realise the branch, which runs right along the frontage is...

a welcome branch.

But it is the enigmatic Zen gardens that I have really come to visit.

And as a result of what I have

already seen on this journey, I hope that they might now make a kind of sense.

Having seen the Yellow Mountains and having visited China...

..it's fallen into place.

It sounds arrogant to say that I understand it

and I'm not pretending I've had a moment of profound enlightenment,

but I feel... I don't need to explain it.

On one level, these are the Yellow Mountains

appearing out of a layer of cloud and it just captures that essence,

that precious fragile reduction,

and so beautifully holds it in space.

On another level, I can see that the gravel represents the empty mind

and the stones and the moss is just moments of perception

appearing through it and that's all you can do in life.

But in a way, all that intellectualising doesn't matter, that's not what it's about.

It just is and when you're here...

it feels right.

I made my visit at dawn and had a precious half hour or so on my own there,

but it was not long before the crowds poured in and the spell was broken.

It's only a quirk of fate that this or any of the Kyoto gardens survive today.

It was the intended target for one of the American atom bombs in WWII,

but was spared thanks to the lobbying of the American Secretary of State for War Harry Stimpson,

who had visited the city and seen its exceptional cultural richness.

So the bomb was diverted to Nagasaki.

So that I can see some of the Zen gardens with more peace and quiet,

I take a Lucky Clover taxi to an ancient temple complex,

which is one of the less well-known treasures of Kyoto.

Oh, look. That is stunning!

On the way there, we pass through a grove of enormous bamboos.

I have to stop the cab and have a look.

So beautiful.

Bamboo grows freely right across China and Korea and Japan

and dominates the cultures wherever it grows.

None more so than in Japan. There are 1,000 different species

and, they say in Japan, there are 1,000 different uses,

and you see it everywhere. It's just part of life.

It's fencing, it's gutters, every tree is supported by bamboo

and the tea ceremony has the labels made out of bamboo.

So clearly, it's immensely useful, but it's more than that,

because it's revered for its qualities

of uprightness and steadfastness and strength.

So a grove like this, which is obviously very beautiful,

is also a place filled with all those qualities

and walking through it, you absorb some of them.

Duly fortified by a healthy dose

of uprightness, steadfastness and strength, I continue my journey,

going to the Daitokuji Temple Complex,

which is the destination of my next garden.

This map gives an idea of the colossal size of the temple complex.

If I'm there,

all the area, with its 24 sub temples,

covers the whole of this vast area.

These sub temples contain hundreds of Zen gardens,

which were mostly created during the most violent period in Kyoto's history.

The first truly Japanese of style garden, the dry garden,

were commissioned and occasionally created

by the Samurai warriors of medieval Japanese society,

who practiced Zen Buddhism and used the gardens as an aid to contemplation

and an expression of Zen enlightenment.

I am visiting the oldest group in this complex - Ryogen-in.

However, my own spiritual journey has to begin

by trying to squeeze my size 11 feet into dainty Japanese slippers.

That's not gonna fit, is it?

I think it's the moment for socks.

Ryogen-in sub temple was completed in 1505

and contains five gardens, which surround the central building.

This is Isshidan, the rock garden.

Immediately, there's incredible energy created by the gravel

that's intended to represent the sea

and the rocks rising like islands out of the sea.

You can almost feel it bashing and swirling around them.

And also these stones. Although, to us,

they are very beautiful, they're completely abstract.

In fact, they represent the tortoise.

That group over there with the taller stone is the crane,

both are symbols of longevity and therefore great good luck.

Then, in the middle, Mount Horai - the legendary mountain.

Three elements which you find again and again in dry gardens.

I love it. I absolutely love it.

All these gardens are designed to be viewed from the building.

The buildings are up on platforms

and so there is this walkway, this very beautiful

wooden walkway, round the outside from which to view the gardens.

And you'd never walk out into them unless you are a monk

and it's your job to tend them.

The word for this style of gardening is karesansui,

which literally means a dried-up landscape.

That does not mean to say that they only used rock and stone,

but there is no water in their element at all.

This moss garden has a rock emerging from the centre

that represents the sacred mountain of Shumisen, which is

the core of the Buddhist universe.

You have this enormous idea, the universe,

and the vast complexity displayed in a relatively small garden using moss and stone.

In itself, the ambition of that is staggering.

These gardens are microcosms of Buddhist philosophy.

The underlying belief is that,

no matter how big the concept, it can be expressed in a tiny space.

This is the smallest stone garden in Japan, Totekiko.

It is a sublime space and obviously, these marvellous floorboards,

and the stanchions, and the roof, it is all part of the garden.

The symbolism is all about the stone

dropping in the water and spreading a ripple.

The ripples spread underneath there

and you would imagine that would be a caper doing that.

One of the difficult aspects of Zen is you really can't talk about it.

Words are not the appropriate medium,

but this little garden is an almost perfect description of Zen.

It displays the fact that every tiny act has a consequence.

Every drop in the water casts a ripple

and if all your life is a series of incidents, however small,

everything affects you and everybody else.

And that's all here. That's all here in this garden.

The dry gardens are designed specifically to aid contemplation.

But over on the other side of Kyoto

is another kind of Zen garden that I want to visit

that involves a more physical engagement through the sharing of ritual.

On my way there, I find myself in the middle of Japan's biggest annual horticultural jamboree.

The cherry blossom is just starting to bloom.

This is a moment of great joy because it signifies the arrival of spring, albeit a rather chilly one,

and an optimistic symbol of new beginnings.

Hanami means cherry blossom viewing, which is the traditional

Japanese celebration of the flowering of the spring season.

Hanami has been widely practised since the eighth century,

when Japanese nobles would recite poetry beneath the flowering canopies.

Having paid my respects to the wonder of cherry blossom,

I travel on to a garden created for the best-known of Japan's Zen rituals - the tea ceremony.

The gardens of the tea ceremony began to appear in Kyoto

at the beginning of the peaceful Edo period, which began in 1603.

-Hello.

-Hello. Please come in.

Tea was introduced to Japan from China in the ninth century

and was first used in religious rituals in Buddhist monasteries.

The samurai took this up, with other aspects of Zen,

and the tea ceremony evolved as a ritualistic practice of its own.

Urasenke is one of the three founding schools

which performed this ritual, called Chado, which is the way of tea.

Their garden is designed to induce

the right frame of mind with which to take part in the ceremony.

The tea garden is quite small,

about the same size in fact as many a British back garden.

The layout is designed around a winding path,

which is intended to reshape your sense of time.

The slippery, irregularly spaced stepping stones

are deliberately intended to slow down your advance into the garden.

In Britain, moss is one of the gardener's major headaches.

Here, it is nurtured and cultivated down the years

as carefully as any prize lawn.

Every tiny detail has meaning.

Paths that are not to be followed

are marked by a rock tied with thick black twine.

Even these are elegant works of art.

The wash basin is for the host and his guests to wash their hands and mouths

to purify themselves before entering the tea house.

Once inside, the dauntingly sober and refined tea ceremony takes place.

It cannot be exaggerated how particular the attention to detail is within the ritual

or how much my knees were hurting at this stage!

Green powdered tea is whisked to a precise froth

then handed to the guest to drink

and while this is happening the path is being sprinkled again.

This preening continues throughout the guest's stay

because a slip in presentation could be misread as an insult.

Mindful of that sensitivity, I tried to hide the fact that the tea tastes, well...

awful!

It is strange, but...interesting.

Everything in this garden is controlled and constrained.

Every plant is clipped, tied and twisted.

Every stone is positioned.

But it's as though there's a great tension

between the Japanese reverence for ritual and the old...

..and their love of the new and of innovation because, of course, plants keep growing.

They're always renewing themselves.

And that tension that you feel, if the pressure was taken off, it would burst apart,

is what gives this place, and, perhaps, Japanese culture, a sort of suppressed energy.

It's certainly fascinating.

So far, I've glimpsed some of the origins of Japanese gardens and traced their unbroken tradition,

that is much older than any surviving European garden.

But I would also like to see a modern Zen garden, something that

relates to Japan's love of innovation as well as its ancient traditions.

-I thought this was nice.

-It is beautiful.

'In the city centre, I meet up with Yukiko, a Japanese interpreter, who says that

'she will show me a temple that did dare to try something different and modern.

'But before that, I am hungry and as an antidote to the slow ritual

'of the tea ceremony we decide to grab some Japanese fast food.'

Would you say that this was traditional food?

Yes, very traditional. Everybody has it because it is a very easy lunch food.

Yes, go ahead, and you can slurp it.

Men, you have to show masculinity.

You show your masculinity by having a good slurp.

Is that the way to do it?

It wouldn't go down well with Mrs Don, I can tell you!

I was watching someone the other day, actually...

How was that? Slurp-tastic?

That was very good.

That was very good.

That was very Japanese.

It is delicious and I happily slurp it all!

Then we head for a temple garden, where the creator had the courage

to break with tradition and modernise the concept of the dry landscape garden.

In its time, this was truly revolutionary.

Tofuku-ji is the head temple of the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism.

Although built in 1236,

it is renowned for its controversial 20th-century Zen gardens.

In 1939, these were designed and built by the late Mirei Shigemori,

a landscape architect and scholar, whose work retained

the traditional Japanese forms and yet eagerly embraced Western modernity.

The first thing that hits me is the scale is magnificent.

That is helped by the context - the buildings in this temple complex

are huge, clean scalloping lines with very powerful uprights.

The stones match that with strength and vigour.

Although to the uninformed Western eye the garden seems conventional, it created an uproar.

The stones were unusually numerous

and, most shocking of all to the traditionalists,

many are lying on their sides instead of vertically.

This might seem slight, but it was a dramatic break with tradition.

After a fire in the 1930s,

Mirei Shigemori designed the gardens free of charge

to help fund the new landscaping on the understanding that his work wouldn't be altered in any way,

and the temple agreed, as long as the materials reclaimed from the fire were recycled.

Although the abbot and monks accepted his designs,

the public were traumatised.

Some stones were not natural, but had been worked by hand.

Azaleas were clipped into man-made shapes.

And the moss grows in geometric rather than organic patterns.

Why did this upset so many people?

Shigemori's grandson, a well-known garden designer in his own right, has come to Tofuku-ji

to explain the background to his grandfather's intriguing garden.

What was the reaction to his design?

HE SPEAKS JAPANESE

Actually, the response was awful

because Tofuku-ji is a very old, traditional, historical temple.

As you can see, you know, he made a garden which has lots of new ideas implanted,

especially the garden in the back.

People thought he created a Western garden because it had the design like a checkerboard.

That checkerboard design is actually a traditional Japanese design,

but the general people did not know that and so the reputation was awful then.

The real reason why people were so upset is because he introduced

Western techniques into sacred temple space.

Shigemori believed that contemporary Japanese gardens of his day

had become meaningless imitations of the past.

He wanted to create a new temple garden that was relevant to modern life,

just exactly as the venerated old ones had been in their day.

You can see why his designs may have been misinterpreted by some Japanese critics

as being too Western, a terrible rebuke back then.

However, this checkerboard pattern is actually traditional,

found on kimonos, paper screens and tea houses.

The big symbolic ideas of Zen are still inherent in the design.

Which I think is just fabulous.

The squares continue picking up the traditional pattern,

which have never been seen in a garden, let alone a temple garden.

But gradually the regularity dissipates

and if you look carefully

you'll see the moss gets lower and lower and merges into the gravel.

The grids are lost and then they just blow apart into nothingness,

but, of course, but nothingness

is just as much something as the ordered world. Well...

whatever interpretation you put on it, I do think that it is inspiring,

it's beautiful,

and seems to me to be completely in place in this temple setting.

This moss garden effectively broke Japanese garden design free

from the shackles of tradition.

At first, it was considered profoundly shocking,

but now it is the most famous 20th-century Japanese garden.

But what of the 21st century?

Can you see somebody like your grandfather

coming along and designing a garden

in a temple that would be as radical and as thought-provoking

as this one?

HE SPEAKS JAPANESE

Yes, I think that can happen, and it should happen.

Already, this garden here is 70 years old.

And at that time it might have been modern and contemporary.

But now it's 70 years

and things are changing.

There are probably new ideas that should be incorporated.

Unfortunately, there hasn't been anything done so far yet.

So far, there haven't been many changes, but it should happen.

Now your turn!

SHE SPEAKS JAPANESE

Yes, I'll try my best.

I set out on this journey confident that I would admire and enjoy

the gardens of China and Japan, but also feeling that

they were a riddle that I didn't have the answer to.

The yellow mountains changed everything for me and helped to

explain how, via their painters and poets,

Chinese gardens are created to distil the pure essence of nature.

The Zen gardens of Japan are still an enigma.

There is no easy answer, but perhaps no hard one either.

I think I'm missing the point if I struggle to interpret these gardens.

The best way to explain them seems to be like this.

When you're working in the garden

and there is just a moment,

of bird song or a shaft of light, or sometimes

you're just planting something and all feels well with the world,

you know that, just for a few seconds, it's perfection.

Well, that seems to me what Zen is all about.

And it's very accessible. We all know it.

It's finding it that's the trouble.

Next time, I'll be visiting the Mediterranean.

The home of some of the world's most famous gardens and a region

where two great cultures have battled it out for a millennium.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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