Family bonding at Garden of Love

NParks' gardening programme marks its 20th anniversary

- Venessa Lee

The garden in front of Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist Association (Singapore) is a fine example of the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, says chief priest Shingako Kato.

Wabi-sabi finds beauty in things that are imperfect. The centuries-old aesthetic has been popularised outside Japan in recent times in areas like interior design.

Reverend Kato, 49, is the religious leader of the Kaimyo-in temple within the association in Geylang. He explains that its garden, like many others in Japan, is built in the tradition of karesansui, "without the use of water". In these dry gardens, white sand or pebbles are raked to suggest streams, while rocks symbolise mountains or islands.

He says: ""'Wabi' refers to the aesthetic sensibility that finds beauty in incompleteness or simplicity, while 'sabi' signifies beauty that resides in the passage of time and the weathering of things. The fusion of these two, expressed as wabi-sabi, forms the core of Japanese aesthetics, which values simplicity and tranquillity over ornamentation.

"Karesansui gardens may be regarded as one of the finest artistic embodiments of wabi-sabi."

The Kaimyo-in Japanese Garden has two main spaces where assistant priests at the temple — Reverend Jozen Suenaga, 34, and Reverend Myosho Nakano, 27 — rake and draw circular patterns in gravel, suggestive of rivers, at 6am every day, as part of their gardening duties. All three priests come from Japan, where Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism was established 800 years ago.

The 300 sq m garden, part of NParks' Community in Bloom (CIB) programme, has won several CIB awards. Transformed from a patch overgrown with lalang in 2013, it is maintained by 12 temple followers in their 50s to 80s. They trim the immaculate lawn of carpet grass every two months or so. Weeds are removed every day.