Gardens and Stones

I've mentioned the gardens that people have around their homes, especially the richer people. In order to have a Japanese style garden, you need to have professional gardeners come at least twice a year to trim and care for the trees and bushes. This picture shows the garden that greets you when you enter the driveway of this rich person's home. You can just see the roof of the building behind the trees.

Another feature of Japanese gardens are large stones that are used as part of the landscaping. Here they are used as a base for the concrete block wall that surrounds the property and as a retaining wall to keep the dirt in the garden from encroaching on the driveway.

 Stones are very important in Japan. This one is beside the road and a little bridge has been built over the canal so that people can get to it. There is a low concrete block wall separating this apparently public property from the surrounding private property. Usually large stones like this have some words engraved on one surface, usually something about the local history or something religious, Buddhist or Shinto. I crossed the bridge and looked carefully at the face of this boulder. There were some indentations but I could not determine whether they were Chinese characters that had been weathered so much that they disappeared or just natural markings. I searched around the area but there was no sign to tell visitors like me something about the stone.