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context: gardens > tea gardens
General Description
These were the first gardens designed for walking through, not for sitting and looking at. Indeed, the gardens were deliberately not visible from inside the tea hut, a major conceptual shift. Strolling slowly through the garden was the start of the tea ceremony, designed to put the guests in the right frame of mind to enter the tea hut, and was returned to at other points, while preparations for the next stage were happening. The design of the footpaths was calculated to control the pace, and to make guests stop at certain points - larger stones signalled this - as well as to protect the moss that often surrounded them. We see stone props appear with these gardens: lanterns, sometimes more decorative than functional, and blocks with indentations containing water, for real or ritual washing.
These Zen tea gardens had to look natural, free of artifice and flashiness. This led to weird contortions...