by Leslie Buck
We drove to a private client of Nakaji’s, and I spent hours raking autumn leaves. After a strong drop in temperature, the deciduous tree holdouts in Kyoto had finally turned color all at once and dropped leaves by the truckful. Maples, cherry, ginkgo, dogwood, and crepe myrtles strutted their fall outfits and dropped them on the floor like models changing quickly off a runway. In my effort to rake up as many piles as fast as I could, I mistakenly pulled up a good patch of moss with my rake. Nishizawa walked by and informed me, “It’s better if you use a broom. An employee was fired once for not being careful enough with the moss,” then walked off. I figured what I had done must have been pretty serious if Nishizawa thought he should break the craftsman’s code of silence and speak to me, so I quickly began raking the torn moss to hide it under a big azalea tamamono shrub.
Yet danger approached. Bossman’s bulky figure tromped briskly down the path, straight in my direction. Nakaji was far enough away that he could not decipher the contents of my pile but close enough to grow suspicious if I raked something under a plant instead of onto a tarp. Please, make him walk another way, I begged. My pile seemed to grow larger with each step he took. I tried to push it around with my rake and willed Nakaji to look at my hands or the rake handle but not the pile.
He’s going to kill me, was my last thought before Nakaji came right before me. I stood frozen. He looked down directly at my pile of moss, looked back up at me, boomed for me to go to another area in the garden, and walked off. A miraculously easy send-off! Running to my new assignment, I whispered, “Thank you, God!” I felt he deserved a little credit too.
The cold affected me every morning. I crossed my arms a lot, trying to make my frame smaller, my clothes bigger. I added layers to my outfit despite the fact that I felt foolish doing so given that the men still dressed like it was summer. But these efforts remained fairly ineffectual because I was still running around in my thin jikatabi. As temperatures dropped, my toes and fingers would numb. I felt myself retract inward, my emotions becoming as exposed and sensitive as the bare maple branches. I thought about Taylor quite a bit. I replayed the same “Does he miss me?” tapes because I had no girlfriends with whom I could have gossip episodes.
That winter, I felt an affinity with one of my favorite plants, the laceleaf maple, known in horticultural circles as Acer dissectum. The laceleaf is more diminutive than other maples, often four feet tall maximum in Bay Area gardens, although it can grow up to fifteen feet tall in prime conditions. The laceleaf mounds into a domelike shape that cascades downward like a spherical waterfall.
Carefully thinning laceleafs after their first spurt of spring growth is no easy feat. Some pruners inadvertently shorten them into popsicle shapes. I like to open them ever so slightly so the puzzle-like inner branches can be glimpsed inside a see-through canopy. In winter the leaves die off and the shrub takes on a leafless, stark, and cool look—the complete opposite of its summer exuberance. By hand, I gently pull off shriveled brown leaves, revealing a beautiful inner world of twining branches.
Along the high mountaintops of Japan, where laceleafs naturally grow, as soon as temperatures drop, the leaves fall off. But in the Bay Area’s mild climate, the leaves stick to the tree. The only way to get them off is by grasping and stroking the dead leaves gently downward, like combing a child’s sensitive head. The pruner’s skill is tested in winter. Any stubby, unnatural-looking cuts previously hidden under summer foliage become an exposition of shame all winter long.
Quality pruning helps the laceleaf show off as a refined winter sculpture—especially if a small light is placed underneath the tree, creating a living silhouette. The most photographed plant at the Portland Japanese Garden is an old laceleaf maple, whose twisting open structure allows for picturesque views into the garden. Before Japan, I always thought of laceleaf maples as a plant that expressed softness and femininity.
I still find them beautiful, but I also feel a certain sadness when I see them now. I’ll look at the bare winter branches and think about how vulnerable they might feel, as I did during my winter in Kyoto. I wish them well in November as I gently pull off their leaves, knowing that by the winter’s end, a few of the most shaded branches, deep inside the tree, will perish. I clean out these dead twigs when I repeat the spring thinning process. I’d never thin a laceleaf in a hot and sunny time of year such as late summer in Northern California, especially on the top. If the maple’s bark is suddenly exposed to strong sunshine, it will burn.
This sadness does not make the laceleaf ugly to me—just the opposite. A while back, I discovered the Japanese word mono-no-awaré in a design book, Japanese Garden Design, by the Japanese garden landscaper and author Marc Peter Keane. He described mono-no-awaré as meaning “beauty, especially one of a subtle, ephemeral nature, or an emotional response to the inherent sadness of life itself.” Mono-no-awaré perfectly describes the laceleaf in winter: lovely, weeping, full of sentiment.
Nakaji’s private client, who looked about the same age as my mom, approached me in the morning. She asked where I was from, and we excitedly discovered that her daughter was going to school at Saint Mary’s College, just over the hill from Berkeley. As we talked about her daughter, I felt a familiar tightening of my chest, my homesickness returning.
I went back to raking peacefully, trying to avoid pulling up any moss, when a garish loudspeaker blasted the ice cream–truck song through the garden. Sure enough, Nishizawa ran out to the street to flag down the truck. Kyoto ice cream? It’s cold, but I’m game! But then I ran to look outside the front gate and saw a small truck with smoke coming out of its chimney. Nishizawa pulled out some cash and bought each of us a foil-covered bundle. I unwrapped my gift, which fit warmly in the palm of my hand, and discovered a steaming sweet potato inside. “Do you have such a thing in the United States?” the guys asked. “Only slightly like it,” I replied, not wanting to delve too far into American children’s sugary eating habits and love of orange Creamsicles.
After break, Nishizawa led me to the other side of the house, where a stone path led to a specific type of garden, with trees that remained mostly green year-round. A canopy of evergreen oak and cypress hovered overhead, held up by matchstick tree trunks. Narrow strands of light fell through slits in the canopy and flickered on and off the ground. Branches swayed overhead. This was the tea garden leading to a wooden teahouse that the client had probably built at great expense. Like a mother hugging her child who has come home from school, the tea garden is an intimate, enclosed space. Planting trees closely together creates a dense forest feel, which can help relax the visitors exiting their busy work lives, moving toward the tea house, preparing to enter the reflective inner world of the tea ceremony.
The landscaper of this particular teahouse garden, or roji, used plants native to Japan, perhaps from the surrounding forests of Kyoto. By using native plants familiar to visitors, the landscaper hoped to encourage an easy, familiar setting rather than a fascinating, unfamiliar one.
While it is true that I enjoy summery rose gardens—I am dazzled by butter yellow Julia Child cultivated roses—the understated traditional roji takes me back in time, and in spirit, to the little forest behind my childhood home, where my friends and I explored plants, insects, birds, and our private thoughts.
Nishizawa patiently explained to me that the main stone placed in front of the entryway of the teahouse was called tobi-ishi. To help myself remember this new Japanese word, I visualized my toe stepping on the rock, to, and thought of the middle of Nishizawa’s name, ishi; putting these two together I got to-ishi, leading me to tobi-ishi. Nishizawa holds my ranking as the number-one humble Uetoh Zoen craftsman. He worked skillfully yet with such good nature. He had an irresistibly friendly personality. I never saw him get angry, and when he laughed it was for a sincere reason. I got the feeling that he looked out for the other workers. After that day, every time I saw a tobi-ishi stone, I thought of Nishizawa.
Despite Nishizawa’s kindness, I waited for b
reak impatiently. I’d worked on a Sunday, after all, and hoped there might be some sweetness to the day. Finally, the tray was delivered silently by Nakaji’s client, the mom. Everyone said together, “Arigatō gozaimasu!” (Thank you very much!) as she stole away. On the tea tray lay the most expensive snacks I’d ever seen. Inch-thick medallions sat in a shiny pile, each artfully wrapped in silver foil. I leaned against a plastered teahouse wall. I later learned this was forbidden because of the live nature of the walls, which pick up oils and show stains if one leans against or touches them. Exhausted, I slowly unwrapped my treat to savor it, drinking my much-appreciated green tea. At the same time, I felt a bit resentful about my Sunday gardening duties. I asked myself, Why do I let gardening take up my whole life? Here I am working thirteen days in a row! What about play? I do so much for the gardens; do they have to take every bit of my life? I bit into the delicate, crisp dessert and tasted a buttery puff pastry filled with a sweet puree.
I asked Nishizawa, “What’s in this?” He responded, “Kabocha squash.” That sounded weird. A squash pastry? I thought about the kabocha and remembered it was sometimes referred to as the Japanese pumpkin. Hmm, Japanese pumpkin in a puff pastry, in November. My family had celebrated Thanksgiving three days earlier. Now I understood.
I pictured the daughter talking to her mom about her American Thanksgiving dinner. I realized I may have just been delivered a secret gift, the closest version of pumpkin pie a Japanese mom could come up with on short notice. I looked again at the delicious kabocha pie in the palm of my hand, and emotion welled up inside me. I reflected on this mysterious offering from a nurturing mom who would understand a girl’s homesickness on a holiday far from home. I thought about how the client made no mention of the dessert, no special eye contact when she dropped off the tray. The men wouldn’t understand the connection, so I stayed silent.
I spent a bit more time looking over my pie, and then polished it off. I felt like an idiot for all the time I’d spent thinking I’m so tired, I’m so cold, I’m so lonely, while everyone else might have been running around, strategizing on how they could do something thoughtful for the American. Sometimes the connections we make in gardens aren’t just with the plants but with the people. In Japanese Garden Design, Mr. Keane says that in historical context the Japanese word for garden, niwa, included “humans in nature as an inherent and indivisible part of it.” The garden in Kyoto brought us together—client, garden, gardener. Bite by bite, I savored my kabocha pie and wiped the excess water from my eyes. It’s just plant allergies, I tried to mentally communicate to the men. I got back to work.
The amount of time the craftsmen spent immaculately cleaning the garden struck me as surreal. First we shook the trees hard by grabbing onto their trunks and mimicking a hurricane. Then we ran around raking fallen leaves like frantic young ducklings paddling after their mom, only we went scrape, scrape, scrape instead of quack, quack, quack. One of the guys used a loud blower to push the remaining leaves into piles. He then reversed the airflow to suck up the tiny fragments of broken leaf.
Last, we picked up the few remaining leaves by hand and washed down the curbside gutters, starting three houses above our client’s property, so no leaves would later be pushed down by wind or water to sully our masterpiece. Nakaji watered down the garden walkways and the path leading to the front door as we backed toward the truck. I turned off the spigot for him. Then he had to water down the front path once again because I’d accidentally left muddy footprints when I walked down the path to return to the truck instead of walking on the moss. Everyone waited and watched while we did this. We did group bows to the mom-client as we stepped backward toward the car.
The sun had just begun to set by the time Nakaji dropped me off on my windy street corner. I headed quickly toward home, wearing two fleece sweaters, a winter jacket, and the thickest hat I’d brought with me to Kyoto. Not nearly warm enough! I worried inwardly about colder days ahead.
The scene made me think of another Sunday I’d spent just outside Kyoto a few weeks earlier. My Kyoto landlord, David, owned a tiny shack in a rural area, which he used to visit to get away from the crowded city. He took me with him one day. When we arrived he struck up a conversation with an elderly farming woman at work in the fields. The farmer, tending her row of vegetables, looked to be older than seventy. Her body stooped as she walked down the field, making her silhouette look like an upside-down L against a gray, overcast sky. I’d worn a thick coat but still hugged it tightly, wishing I’d brought a thicker hat. Upon our introduction, the woman said, smiling, with David translating, “I can’t wait for winter.” Her sentences swayed up and down, making her comments sound dramatic and tortured. “This weather makes me so hot!” She wore a thin cotton shirt with sleeves rolled up. I admired and envied the farming woman.
Wind whipped around me and the Kyoto concrete as I made my way home. I pulled down my fleece hat to cover the lowest tips of my earlobes, envisioning sleeping under several layers of covers that evening, which would probably make me sweat a little. I couldn’t wait.
Room with a View of Nature
I finally had a precious Sunday off after thirteen days of gardening with the men. So what did I do? I went to a bonsai show, spent an hour staring at a tree, and then cooked dinner with my coworker, Kei. Hovering at the back of my mind was the fact that the crew and I would leave before dawn the next morning to work at a private client’s home out of town. I’d become immersed in the demanding schedule of the Kyoto craftsmen. Small surprises and tiny intrigues became my rewards.
After months of working with the men, I’d do just about anything to spend time with a woman. So when an American friend who lived in Kyoto, Shannon, asked if I would like to look at stylized plants at an annual Kyoto bonsai exhibit on my day off, I responded, “Look at plants? Yes!” Walking through the show, we chatted nonstop about plants, my boyfriend, her husband, her design and textile business, and our opinion on just about everyone and anything within sight. I adored spending time with her—a woman at last. Shannon personified everything the men weren’t. She was emotionally expressive and chatty. She wore a snug skirt that showed off her lovely, delicate, feminine figure. She allowed her long blonde hair to tumble in loose waves about her shoulders. As Shannon and I covered every topic possible, I barely had time to look at the huge bonsai passing our vision.
I explained to Shannon, “Bonsai simply means ‘plant in a pot.’ You can impress your friends if you pronounce the word bonsai properly by making the first ‘o’ long and saying the second part quickly, ‘bone-sayee.’” The trees in the exhibit sat spaced apart on long tables like paintings in a museum. These masterpieces grew as we spoke. The exquisite plants we walked past had been watered, fed, root-pruned, and styled for decades, even centuries. In their prime, they’d be brought inside the home or to a bonsai show for display, then taken back outside to a garden if the homeowner liked caring for them, or to a bonsai nursery if a professional looked after them. Many of my clients do not realize that almost all bonsai need to live outdoors. “If you buy a plant,” I advised Shannon, “you’ll need to water it regularly, perhaps every day in the summer. My little nephew kept track of the constant watering schedule by watering his bonsai with the leftover dog’s water, each day that he freshened up the water bowl. Eventually we can teach you how to trim it. It’s sort of like a pet.”
The bonsai techniques I learned near the beginning of my pruning studies still guide me two decades later. Faced with a difficult plant to style, I go straight to bonsai principles. I explained to Shannon, “Bonsai are not meant to look cool or manipulated—quite the opposite. Look at these plants and imagine real trees enlarged in the landscape, just like when you look at a landscape painting and imagine real scenes. Paintings are made simply of canvas and paint, whereas a bonsai is actually a living plant. So using one’s imagination with the plant shouldn’t be so hard. The bonsai artist studies nature carefully, takes into account horticultural science, and hopefully
allows the spirit of the plant to have some say. A skilled bonsai artist would never dominate or manipulate her plant.”
I’ve noticed that, in any bonsai show, even the most unsavvy bonsai enthusiast can separate the bonsai that looks overmanipulated from the one that looks natural and filled with drama. It’s okay with me that not all bonsai are masterpieces. I’ll hang any painting created by someone I know. But most of us have managed to see a few masterpiece landscape paintings in our lives. These are the paintings that enchant us into believing that we are almost in the painting, feeling the scene. The same goes for bonsai. Many bonsai artists just have fun and try their best; only a few can style a two-foot bonsai crabapple tree in such a way that when we look at it, we imagine being a child again, sitting under the shade of its drooping branches, ready to pluck a secret treat.
Shannon and I walked and chatted so intently that I hardly noticed even the most spectacular bonsai. Her bright spirit outshone them. As she was telling me a story about her husband, I spotted an old man sitting on a bench facing a rather smaller bonsai than the rest. The plant caught my eye too, even though it had been placed at the end of the table rather than in the center. It looked to be only a foot or so high, whereas the others stood well over three feet. Tiny red fruits hung from this crooked tree—I recognized the bonsai as a dwarf pomegranate. There must have been fifteen spectacular larger plants within view. But this small plant was the only one to pull my attention away from my golden girlfriend.