Metaphor

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Design Principles
There are certain intrinsic principles that one needs to grasp to successfully capture the spirit of the Japanese garden. Most importantly, nature is the ideal that you must strive for. You can idealize it, even symbolize it, but you must never create something that nature itself cannot.
For example, you would never find a square pond in the wild, so do not put one in your garden. You may certainly use a waterfall, but not a fountain. Another key point to remember is balance, or sumi. You are always trying to create a “large” landscape even in the smallest of spaces. While that nine-ton boulder looks right at home in the six-acre stroll garden, what effect does it have on a ten by ten courtyard? It would have all the grace and subtlety of a horse in a closet. Choose your components carefully.
Rocks can represent whole mountains, pools become lakes. A small stretch of raked sand can become an entire ocean. The phrase “ Less is more” was surely first spoken by a garden master.
The elements of time and space
One of the first things that occur to western eyes viewing a Japanese garden is the “emptiness” of portions of the garden. This is unsettling to gardeners accustomed to filling every space in the garden for a riot of color, but it is a key element in the design of Japanese gardens. This space, or ma, defines the elements around it, and is also defined by the elements surrounding it. It is the true spirit of in and yo, that which many of us know by the Chinese words yin and yang. Without nothing, you cannot have something. This is a difficult point to grasp, but it is a central tenet of Japanese gardening.
Another key point to ponder is the concept of wabi and sabi. Like so many Japanese words, there is no single translation. Wabi can denote something one-of-a-kind, or the spirit of something; the closest we can come to a literal translation is “solitary”. Sabi defines time or the ideal image of ...