Parts of it do. The lantern corner with the pines, the gateway; I absolutely love these. The patio area is not particularly Japanese but eating in the garden with family is always the most fun of mealtimes.
The chamomile lawn is a nod to the tea plantations I’ve seen from the Shinkansen bullet train between Tokyo and Kyoto. Monty said he’d never seen chamomile used in the way we had, and neither had I. I felt reassured when I spotted a few sprigs of chamomile around some paving in the East Meets West garden at the Chelsea Flower Show.
The zen garden is a folly of sorts. At least at present. Monty and I talked about the zen garden off camera. We had both been to the gravel garden at Ryan-ji Zen temple in Kyoto and came away with different reactions. I’d wanted to visit this unique gravel garden for years having seen photos of it in a book. It looked magical, serene, a unique garden.
However, when Jake and I went in 2009 it was very crowded, with a lot of noise and not at all serene. It was also being renovated at the time, so the charm wasn't there at all. The connection I made in the photo to this oasis of calm wasn’t there. When Monty visited he was given special access before the crowds so that he could bathe in the garden in the peaceful atmosphere it was designed to exist in. On screen it looked blissful.
So as we sat on the edge of the deck looking on the gravel and stones below I confided that my zen garden was not a place to find zen per se, but a place to understand the zen garden. To which he offered that what interested him was not the stones in the garden necessarily but the spaces between. So that has become an interesting area of my approach to the zen garden and the wider garden itself.