David Slawson’s Japanese garden design incorporates a stream and patio in a small backyard in Fayetteville, Ark.
If you’re interested in a variety of gardening aesthetics, Japanese garden designer David Slawson of Seven Hills has a video on YouTube that he thinks you’ll enjoy.
In the short video, with a background of tranquil music and a slideshow, Slawson explains the essence of Japanese gardening and how it differs from the Western approach to dressing up yards.
“One of the striking differences between Japanese gardens and most western gardens is the Japanese use of plants to evoke their habitat in nature versus the western use of plants purely for their decorative qualities,” Slawson says on the video. “A plant’s special beauty comes fully alive in the context of its habitat.”
If that piques your interest, and you’re curious about how you might weave Japanese influences into your landscape, Slawson expounds on the subject on his new DVD, “Evoking Native Landscape Using Japanese Garden Principles,” available for $15.
The DVD takes viewers on a journey through three key aspects of Japan landscape art form: sources of inspiration, natural habitat, and compositional techniques.
“The film demystifies the art by showing how aesthetic techniques based on observation of nature and human perception are used to create gardens with the power to move us and soothe our spirit,” Slawson said in a telephone interview.
Slawson apprenticed in Kyoto in 1971-72 under Kinsaku Nakane, who he says is one of Japan’s foremost 20th-century garden makers. Slawson designed the Japanese Garden at Cleveland Botanical Garden in 1974. He also designed the Japanese gardens at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., and Garvan Woodland Gardens in Hot Springs, Ark. These two have been voted among the top 10 Japanese gardens in America, he said.
His book, “Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens: Design Principles, Aesthetic Values,” is regarded as a classic for its presentation of landscape design principles and translation of the 15th-century Japanese garden manual “Illustrations for Designing Mountain, Water, and Hillside Field Landscapes,” he said.
Slawson has spent the past 40 years designing, writing and teaching. Throughout his career, he’s moved toward taking the universal principles of the Japanese garden art form and interpreting them to show the beauty of native landscapes in North America and throughout the world. His ideal is to create gardens inspired by the beauty of regional landscapes and unique attributes of a site, using locally available materials and the client’s taste.
“Every ecosystem on earth offers places of beauty worthy of recreating in the garden, and the possibilities are endless,” he said. “What you need are the aesthetic tools, imagination and a skilled garden maker, preferably combined in one.”
The DVD is 32 minutes long and features photos taken by Slawson and his partner, Sylvia M. Banks, who has had many of her landscape photos in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park calendar and other publications. The production and meditative background music are by Greg Slawson — Slawson’s nephew and a graduate of The Cleveland Institute of Music in piano — from his CD “Waterflow II.”
“The most moving, deeply satisfying landscape gardens don’t come from our heads, but come through our heart and senses, from our experience in the natural world,” he concludes.
To order the DVD, call Slawson at 216-524-3257 or e-mail david_slawson@sbcglobal.net
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