Japanese Touch for Your Garden [Hardcover]

Kiyoshi Seiki (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1980

One hundred fifty full-color plates illustrate a guide to creating a Japanese garden that includes ground plans and a concise text.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

KIYOSHI SELKE was born in Kyoto in 1918 and holds degrees from the Tokyo Academy of Fine Arts and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. One of postwar Japan's most original and thoughtful residential designers, he was with Masanobu Kudo a chief editor of Sakutei no Jiten (Encyclopedia of Garden Making). He is currently professor emeritus at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

MASANOBU KUDO was born in Tokyo in 1924 and holds a degree in East Asian history from Kyoto University. He helped found the avant-garde Ohara school of flower arranging and in 1969 became the director of the Japan Ikebana Arts Association. An acknowledged expert on flowers, trees, and plants, he has contributed to numerous publications on flower arranging and Japanese gardens.

DAVID H. ENGEL, who served as editorial consultant for this volume, is a prominent American landscape architect and site planner. For several years in the 1950s, he studied in Japan under Tansai Sano, the late master landscape architect of Kyoto. Now in practice with an office in New York City, Mr. Engel does both private residential and large scale commercial and public work. His designs include Heian pavilions for the headquarters of the Gulf States Paper Corporation and the Japanese garden on the Rockefeller estate, acknowledged to be the finest in the Western world. A contributor to House Beautiful and The New Yorker, Mr. Engel is also the author of Japanese Gardens for Today.
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc; 1st edition (July 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870113917
• ISBN-13: 978-0870113918
• Product Dimensions: 11.9 x 8.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #101,302 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Begin With a Classic, October 10, 2000

By 

EternalSeeker (Albuquerque, NM USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Japanese Touch for Your Garden (Paperback)

This slender book packs a big punch. It has been a how-to Japanese gardening classic for many years, and is a fine place to start. Long on good photography, not wordy, but gets right to the design philosophy behind the gardens. Especially well geared for those without a lot of space to work with. I only wish it were bigger! If you find yourself looking for more at this end of this book, may I recommend 'Japanese Gardens: Right Angle and Natural Form' by Gunter Nitschke (1993, Benedikt Taschen) for more on fabulous pictures, history and design theories.

55 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Guidebook for Planning Your First Japanese Garden, August 23, 2003

By 

Renee Thorpe (Karangasem, Bali) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Japanese Touch for Your Garden (Paperback)

Not a coffee table glamour book, not a glossed-over editorial toss-off destined for the remainder bin. This is quite simply the best guidebook for the amateur of the Japanese garden who wishes to try out the concepts at home.

It can be very frustrating to take home some fancy book on Zen gardens, only to find that it contains no real help for creating one. This book's real, step-by-step, practical advice is what anyone is after. It does not pretend to be the end-all of the art, & rather it admits this right from the title (A Japanese TOUCH...) This book will get you the right LOOK.

I found especially useful the diagrams of how to get balance (especially through rocks) within a space. There are some very good illustrations of bamboo fencing, too. Botanical suggestions and lists of suppliers are also helpful, but these lists are not exhaustive. You can achieve the basic framework with this book, though. I have yet to find a better Japanese gardening book... room for improvement is in expanding the above lists and adding practical suggestions for more ambitious, larger landscaping. But this will get you the basics.

Bonus delight is the first entry, a mood-setting piece on one man's contemplation of mountains and forests... all to be found in his tiny Japanese garden.

Grab a copy and use it and love your results!

44 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Japanese Touch for your Garden, August 27, 2001

By 

Al Aliment (Kaneohe, HI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Japanese Touch for Your Garden (Paperback)

Using this book and lots of my time I took a boring townhouse courtyard and turned it into a mini Japanese garden of peace and tranquility. My results were so promising I expanded to the front yard and outside the courtyard fence. The book's beautiful pictures and down to earth language gave me the confidence to select and place my plants, rocks, lanterns and install a water basin plus lights for nighttime enjoyment. I'm still using the book's ideas as I build and install a wooden lattice around the garden's perimeter. (This will resemble growing bamboo, which is too large for my space) Yes you can hire someone to do your Japanese garden but why do it and miss all the trial and error that makes creating you own garden so enjoyable. Take this book home and get started. You will not go wrong.