THE ADELAIDE - HIMEJI GARDEN: South Terrace Adelaide

Adelaide's sister city in southern Japan, Himeji, is dominated by its medieval castle, with exquisite sightings of it from the city's large formal gardens. And there is an echo of their beauty in our own parklands.

The Adelaide-Himeji Garden is a small enclosed refuge from the city scramble, sitting near South Terrace where the hills traffic spills into Pulteney Street. The intention of its founders on the Adelaide City Council was to cement the bonds of friendship between the cities that have grown now over almost twenty years. Himeji's castle garden is revered, and while ours is quite modest in size, it helps us to understand two distinct styles of garden design - the Sansui garden, with its suggestions of the sea and the mountains, and the Kare-Sansui. It again symbolises sea and land, but this time visitors can see it is very austere - very ZEN. Raked coarse sand represents the oceans while groups of rocks are seen as islands.

While the Adelaide-Himeji Garden celebrates a connection between two modern cities, the traditions represented inside go back perhaps 1500 years. It's enclosed by high hedges and walls - Japanese people regard a special place like this as an isolated work of art, appreciated all the more if it is separated from the daily grind. And the special language of the gardens starts with its temple-like roofed gate - it's also traditionally a very spiritual place. Sitting low beneath a bamboo screen and stone lantern is a "chozubachi", or water bowl, and outside a temple it would give someone arriving a chance to wash.

We found city gardener, Charlie Lapore, nipping single needles from a pine. "It encourages growth in the right direction", he explained. An Italian-Australian with a keen sense of traditional Japanese design, he's been here since it was completed nearly 17 years ago. The ever-present black pines are bonsai on a big scale, carefully shaped. They read as meaning long life, and also waiting for a lover. There's no wham-bam message here, however, quite the opposite.

The idea of gardens as an artful balance between manufactured and natural beauty goes back more than a thousand years in Japan, and along the way stone lanterns were added to the design elements. The city of Himeji made a gift for the Adelaide-Himeji Gardens' formal opening in 1985 of a grand ornamental light in the Okunoin style. It came in seven large, carved granite bits, with precise instructions about the way it was to be assembled - even to the direction in which its zodiac symbols should face.

As Zen Buddhism grew in Japan some 800 years ago, garden designers reflected its focus on meditation, and so a very austere and deceptively simple look took root. Our parklands piece of that tradition has such a teahouse garden with its raked sand and carefully placed boulders. Within it, there are layers of philosophical meaning and abstract architectural beauty in its spaces and shapes. It's demonstrably a place for contemplation, sitting on the long verandah bench of an illusory teahouse beyond. And close to any teahouse in any Japanese garden, there will be a stylised well or spring to provide water for the tea ceremony. Tea was brought to Japan by the monks to help them through their long meditations. Slowly, however, the ceremony took on a more social slant, and the gardens lightened up too. Our "ido" or well, is an ancient looking block of stone with a "spring" bubbling from a bowl carefully carved into it.

Himeji's castle garden is huge and has several sections with teahouses, broad waterfalls and ponds, and exquisitely trained plantings. Visitors see their visits as a spiritual pilgrimage, taking in its serene beauty and symbolic messages.

Our version is modest by comparison, but then again, they've had 500 years start. The South Parklands' enclosure is based on what the experts call a "stroll garden". From the entrance, we're transported past the pond and on to the waterfall and into the "mountains", or Nature. The path leads to the teahouse, and so all along Nature is suggested.

We needed some help to get to today's design. Conceived in 1982 as our sister-city relationship took root, it grew to fruition three years later, but the first Council-staff design was…well, it was not quite up to it. Thanks, however, to two voluntary working visits by renowned and wealthy landscape designer, Mr Yoshitaka Kumada and team in the late 1980's, the layout was much improved to adhere to traditional principles.

More work in the last few months has been mostly under the lake, making it leak proof. But, on the surface, the garden ages gracefully and invites you to meditate and to stroll and sense its mood on the edge of Spring. Soon this entry into the old world will sparkle with youthful blossom, as each season brings new meaning to the sense of balance in our serene Adelaide-Himeji Garden.

Details:
Location: South Terrace (near Glen Osmond Road intersection) Adelaide, South Australia.
Opening Hours: 8.00am to 1 hour before sunset, 7 days per week (brochures available on site)
Brochures/Information: City of Adelaide Customer Centre
Tel: 8203-7203
Fax: 8203-7575
Email: city@adelaide.sa.gov.au