It may seem strange that fierce warriors should also be into tea and gardening. Some samurai also devoted themselves to the Zen-inspired arts of tea ceremony and landscape gardening, like Ueda Soko (1563-1650), who not only founded his own style of tea ceremony, still practised today, but also designed the fabulous Shukkeien Garden in Hiroshima. Zen was quickly embraced by the samurai, who identified with its emphasis on simplicity, self-discipline, and the importance of meditation to find one's true self, undistracted by ostentation and worldly possessions. But in the Kamakura Era, the balance of power shifted, and the samurai-warrior class rose to prominence. Lords and ladies of the Imperial Court would go boating there amid the sumptuous beauty. Previously, the gardens of the Heian Era (794-1185) were lavish recreations of Buddhist visions of paradise. Explorer and art historian Langdon Warner ( the inspiration for the Indiana Jones character) observed that Japanese gardens are designed "to express the highest truths of religion and philosophy precisely as other civilisations have made use of the arts of literature and philosophy".
But there's more to the gardens than mere beauty. Rock and stones are vital elements in any Japanese garden, and the ultimate expression of the beauty of stones lies in the sekite i, or rock gardens, expanses of raked white gravel, dotted with strategically-placed stones. The ancient enigma that resonates today As 19th-Century writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote: "to comprehend the beauty of a Japanese garden, it is necessary to understand the beauty of stones." Yet in Japan, some of the most astonishing gardens consist of nothing but rocks and stones. For most gardeners, stones – along with slugs, blackfly and weeds – are a pest, something to be eradicated.
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