Portland Japanese Garden

Grey basalt slabs grouted with green fuzzy moss. Random patterns cleverly joined leading to great weathered wood pillars, edging into foundations supporting stark white walls, frosted with great thick tiles. A hint of sun lights up a steep shady slope carpeted with sword fern. Overhead tower slender doug firs.

Mysterious metal things, curved, embossed with dingbats, rounds with swirling centers, embedded here and there in flagstone and aggregate, the path edges black round river rock and curled up brown big leaf maple leaves from last fall. Short stocky stone walls, fringed in hairy moss, licorice ferns poking out of cracks, and topped with a little bamboo fence, round and flat pieces, each joint trussed up presents with weathered hemp bows fraying at the edges. Pea gravel, doug fir cones and needles, lush emerald green moss.

Wooden structures, joints neat and precise, repeating patterns, contrasting tones and shades of brown, red brown, yellow brown. Multi-trunked, scales shedding, twisted branched Pine in a sea of mondo grass and its own needles. The bare branches of weeping Japanese maples, tips yellow and red, twin buds still tightly embraced. Large graceful branches of western red cedars hang down hugging their trunks. Flat topped horizontal yews add a dark green backdrop to the vertical tiered pagoda. Thick ground hugging moss rolling sea swell beds with rock islands here and there.

Crunchy pea gravel path through quiet shady grove. Thick glossy rhododendrons wait spring with swelling flower buds. Down a hillside of irregular stone steps, through pieris and azalea branches, a pond reflects the grey sky above. Across the pond, moss covered rock-islands and high cliffs of a big bolder. The bridge arcs over the pond. Late January and the air smells of sarcocca and skimmia.

The pond empties, pausing here and there, down a small rock edged stream. Mounding shrubs in hues of green interspersed with bare branches in subtle shades of pink, mauve, peach, etc. The sky and tall conifers reflect in the creek water. A copper finial on the bridge, worn shiny by many hands, seems to be signaling like sentinels to the stone lantern down the stream.

Across the pond, a forest of pines, deeply etched furrows running up the trunk, each carefully shaped branch, each needle cluster in precisely the correct place. A small waterfall across the way sings life to the two metal egrets feeding in the low bamboo.

The teahouse contrasts sharply. Wood and rocks, stone and moss, tatami mats, neat edges blend back into nature, cement, gravel, metal guards, and seas of moss.

Massive weeping maples, each twist and turn of the branches reflecting a year of growth and pruning, reaching out like Halloween ghouls with long pointed fingernails, reaching out and down toward the carpet of moss below.