A Special Guest Zen of Creativity Chapter 12

[Meitou]

Thank you

This way of displaying trees derived from the traditional Japanese 'Tokonoma', an indoor alcove made in a certain way for displaying Ikebana, a scroll, some pottery or other.
Here, from the alcove itself, there is only the floor and limiting bamboo sticks on the floor (the former walls) left.

There are usually three elements 'in' it. The tree with its pot and a stand (bonsai is about the tree WITH the pot), a hanging scroll and an accent (a small accent plant or a suiseki stone, etc.).
The elements should not repeat themselves i.e. no tree planted on a stone and a picture of mount fuji or a suiseki together;
no blooming tree and booming cherries on the scroll or a blooming accent plant together, etc.

The tree should represent the season, nature is in.
Ideally the accent plant should be a very little further in development than the actual season, for promising, what is going to come.
I like when the tree is a Yamadori (found, not hand-raised from seed, specimen), the accent being a plant from the actual finding spot.
However, an accent that tells lush, full growth together with a tree that tells gnarly fight for life, don't fit well.

'Shitakusa' (下草) and 'Kusamono' (草物) are the terms to google for ;-).
They're not only used as tree accents, but stand for themselves, too.
Bamboo, grass, moss, fern, blooming flowers, fruiting berries, fungi, seedlings, everything is possible if it is the right accent and season representation. I like using weeds ;-)
Planted in pottery, roof tiles, deadwood, slate or other stone plates (earth covered with moss), etc.. I have some in old rusty drum-brake drums ;-).
[ATTACH=CONFIG]6313[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]6314[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]6315[/ATTACH]
(The empty pots are 'cheap' ceramic, not 'artist' works. Just to show the wire fastened mesh that covers the bottom hole).
The substrate is often less penetrable than that of the trees, because the small (sometimes thimble sized pots) don't hold much water.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]6312[/ATTACH]

Traditionally there is a gender aspect regarding the usage of glazed (female) or unglazed (male) pottery.
Coniferous (needles) trees are seen as male and are used together with unglazed pottery and deciduous (falling leaves) trees or even flowering trees are seen as female and used together with glazed, sometimes quite colourful ceramic.

The accent plant on the tree-pictures is Ophiopogon japonicus 'Minor', evergreen and with little white to violet bell-shaped blossoms in mid-summer.
Normally, you would not combine those evergreen, needle look with coniferous plants, as I did,
but I am longing for the green meadows to reappear in spring and found it looking a bit like green grass.
With the orange glazed ceramic, I found the 'female' aspect accenting the 'male' conifers quite nicely (Have I just written that?).
The ceramic is standing on a piece of slate in the pictures.

Thanks for asking,
Gassho,
Kotei sat/lah today.

Kotei this post exemplifies everything I believe about how we are all artists, and art itself has no confines, no barriers.
I find your work intriguing, inspiring and so beautiful.
Like Jinyo, I've just started to sort out the cortile for the next season. My plan this year is to concentrate on growing food in tubs and planters, and have the very minimum of decorative plants. Now having seen your posts I'm wondering how I can draw on this wonderful gardening ethos even amongst my salad plantings. I'm looking at my basil, sage and thyme plants with a different eye, you might even say a 'Miksang' eye as used by the Miksang Photography group, whose principles are based in the photographic ethos of Chogyam Trungpa. Miksong in Tibetan means 'good eye and I think of it more as looking with clarity and immediacy, so that everything in the lens is seen as if for the first time, dropping all labels and concepts of what it is, and perfect just as it is 8n the moment. I find this compatible with JDL's work too.
What great ideas are coming out of these visual and verbal discussions, thank you so much everyone.
Gassho
Meitou
Sattoday lah

[Kotei]

Jinyo,
I think we've been facing the same storms, somewhat more extreme in the UK.
Thankfully the large trees in the garden survived, but there is still some cleanup work left.

Meitou,
I like what you write about Miksang.
These accent plants changed my view about weeds. Weeding in the garden, knowing that I am the one who chooses what's weed and what not is one thing. But choosing weeds as flowers to keep in a pot is somehow different.
I threw so many wild geranium, wild strawberries, tuffs of grass, different mosses in unpleasing places and much more without much thought away, before starting to keep some of them and admiring the beauty of how the intense smelling, softly outstretching wild geranium leaves and their beautiful flowers enfold.
The small, usually ignored, becoming the main focus.

Gassho,
Kotei sat/lah today.

[Cooperix]

Hello everyone,

This is probably getting really off the original topic, but this interesting gardening dialogue reminded me of Masanobu Fukuoka. His classic One Straw Revolution changed my perspective on gardening, farming, food production. I just checked and they have begun another printing of this book. When I checked a few years ago it was out of print. Good sign. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003WUYP74...ng=UTF8&btkr=1
from the book cover:
During the past forty years (originally published in 1978) Masabobu Fukuoka has witnessed with indignation the degeneration of both the land and of Japanese society. In those years the Japanese have followed single-mindedly the american model of economic and industrial development, abandoning their rich heritage of working closely and simply with their land. Mr. Fuduoka, hoover, was determined not to forsake traditional farming. Instead, he refined it so that his natural farming method requires less labor and less disruption of nature than any other, while maintaining the same yields per acre as his farmer neighbors.
He feels that natural farming prodceed from the spitrual health of the individual. He considers the healing of the land and purification of the human spirit to be the same process...


Inspiring story of his life and the hopeful way to work the earth.

gassho
Anne

~lahst~

[Meitou]

Hello everyone,

This is probably getting really off the original topic, but this interesting gardening dialogue reminded me of Masanobu Fukuoka. His classic One Straw Revolution changed my perspective on gardening, farming, food production. I just checked and they have begun another printing of this book. When I checked a few years ago it was out of print. Good sign. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003WUYP74...ng=UTF8&btkr=1
from the book cover:
During the past forty years (originally published in 1978) Masabobu Fukuoka has witnessed with indignation the degeneration of both the land and of Japanese society. In those years the Japanese have followed single-mindedly the american model of economic and industrial development, abandoning their rich heritage of working closely and simply with their land. Mr. Fuduoka, hoover, was determined not to forsake traditional farming. Instead, he refined it so that his natural farming method requires less labor and less disruption of nature than any other, while maintaining the same yields per acre as his farmer neighbors.
He feels that natural farming prodceed from the spitrual health of the individual. He considers the healing of the land and purification of the human spirit to be the same process...


Inspiring story of his life and the hopeful way to work the earth.

gassho
Anne

~lahst~

This looks so interesting Anne, in fact there is the original manifesto that you wrote about above, and also a commentary by Larry Korn who edited Fukuoaka's original work, both look so good, thanks for this.
Gassho
Meitou
sattodaylah

[Meitou]

Just a couple more before we begin the approach to the final chapters. These were reflections that I put down as part of a 'Dear Earth' project that I recently took part in, which consisted of dedicating time each day to reflecting on the earth, the environment and all that is happening, and also feeling gratitude for all that the earth gives us. In this little doodle I was thinking about water, one of our basic needs yet a commodity that we in the west tend to take completely for granted.

ch 12 water.jpg

ch 12 water words.jpg

Gassho
Meitou
sattodaylah