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context: gardens > general points
Borrowed Scenery
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Shoden-ji |
This concept, called shakkei, is about selectively using (and hiding) the external landscape - trees, buildings, mountains or whatever, even the sky - as part of the artistic compositions. Obviously this is a particularly useful idea if you have a dramatic mountain or something within sight, and is to be avoided if you are bracketed between a multi-storey car-park and a scrap yard.
The 17th Century Shoden-ji temple garden shown here has the benefit of one of Japan's most famed mountains, Mt. Hiei, which is carefully framed to give a backdrop to the dry Zen garden, which uses clipped azalea bushes instead of the more usual rocks.