context: gardens > tea gardens > general description

Artlessness

There were various contrived practices to make tea gardens look natural. Zen's love of naturalness was explicitly not about deliberately avoiding artifice, but that the superior quality would simply arise through not seeking the inferior one. This isn't quite how tea gardens played out...

They contained rubbish pits; these were filled with leaves and pine needles to show that the garden had been cleaned - but the contents did not have to result from actual cleaning. Brooms were left out to show the same thing - but never the brooms actually used for sweeping up. Larger tea gardens contained two toilets - one for actual use, one to be admired only. There's a relevant anecdote in the upcoming page on Rikyu too...