The Japanese Tea Garden

In this richly illustrated volume, designer Marc Peter Keane looks at how social, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical influences combined over hundreds of years to produce one of the world's most transcendent forms of landscape art. The Japanese tea garden today is immediately recognizable for its elegant gates, stepping stones, lanterns, water basins, mossy ground, and other elements in a setting resembling a forest path. Yet in its purest form, the purpose of this path, or roji, is to transport the visitor from the everyday world to the rarefied realm of the tea ceremony, chanoyu. The tea garden is thus a physical as well as a spiritual space, and its powerful cultural role has led its design and materials to influence every other form of garden art in Japan.