Northwest of Osaka is the Adachi Museum of Art, a fabulous museum with seriously good Japanese art.  Not knowing enough about Japanese art myself, what I found remarkable were its gardens.  Although only planted in 1980, Adachi’s founder scavenged the country for truly unusual specimens of plants and conifers, ancient and young, and funded the construction of what can be described as one of the best gardens in Japan.

The millennial Japanese tradition of gardening has its original roots in China and Korea and the Adachi gardens elegantly incorporate these elements into the magnificent landscape featured above … water, gravel and trees.

Although in Europe garden styles have drastically changed in the last 500+ years, in Japan they have basically remained unchanged, a fact I truly find amazing.  The Japanese garden design, with its simple lines and curves, is utterly as “in” now as it was in 1500… a timeless testament to the merits of proportion, form and raw simplicity.