page_title: Japanese garden
section_title: Hermitage garden
hierarchical_section_title: Japanese garden / Garden styles / Hermitage garden
caption_attribution_description: Shisen-dō, at Kyoto Japan, built in 1641.
context_page_description: Japanese gardens are traditional gardens whose designs are accompanied by Japanese aesthetics and philosophical ideas, avoid artificial ornamentation, and highlight the natural landscape. Plants and worn, aged materials are generally used by Japanese garden designers to suggest an ancient and faraway natural landscape, and to express the fragility of existence as well as time's unstoppable advance.
  Ancient Japanese art inspired past garden designers. By the Edo period, the Japanese garden had its own distinct appearance.
context_section_description: A hermitage garden is a small garden usually built by a samurai or government official who wanted to retire from public life and devote himself to study or meditation. It is attached to a rustic house, and approached by a winding path, which suggests it is deep in a forest. It may have a small pond, a Japanese rock garden, and the other features of traditional gardens, in miniature, designed to create tranquility and inspiration. An example is the Shisen-dō garden in Kyoto, built by a bureaucrat and scholar exiled by the shogun in the 17th century. It is now a Buddhist temple.
caption: Shisen-dō, built in Kyoto, in the 17th century, one of the best examples of a hermitage garden
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