I love roof tiles.

Dominique (in the stetson), with Amy holding her mother Kaoru’s arm. Mrs T. walk the whole way up into the garden.

The real garden begins after your climb to the gift shop and other buildings.

The shape of the building, the proportions, the mossy roof…..

These took me a while to figure out. They were arranged on the ground as pavers…..these are the roof tiles viewed edge on.

Mt Hood in the distance. This was a beautiful vista point.

None of the photos came out inside….story of the tops of a Torii gate washed away after the earthquake that decimated Fukashima and washed up on the Pacific coast. Luckily discovered by a man of Japanese heritage who realized what they were….they managed to track down the location in Japan, get them returned and restored and re-dedicated by the same man, still alive, who funded the original construction in the 1960s .

I guess a river or the shoreline around the island formed by the grass.

I believe this was a very intentional cultivated shaping of the trees limbs.

This image was too big to upload full-size, this is the 20MB version.

Very wabi-sabi, a large rock looking like a limestone cliff 1000’s of feet high.

Wonderful things were in the water…..

Exquisite, a carp in the color of traditional porcelain.

Like the toy birds except in massive bamboo….

Tiny little sculpture

Beautiful moss garden covering the side of a hill.

The garden was quite hilly, with steep stairs connecting the different levels. Kaoru navigated them quite spryly.

They are very fetching, I am sure someone I know will be asking for one for her garden….

I like the juxtaposition of the different shapes and varied levels of refinement from flat almost natural rock to the rough hewn slabs to the smooth slab at the bench (which is out of frame). Natural and man-made, all arrange of course, the natural stepping stones almost but not quite placed as if this was how they were found and the shelter grew around them.

I was quite surprised that the flower and the water tension were in sharp focus, given that this was heavily cropped and taken from 5 feet above without a zoom lens (I brought only one lens that day)

Kaoru said before the war (WWII), wealthy Japanese homes had walls like this around the exterior, sometimes 10 feet high. I wonder what the seal at the end tile is? I think if you look at the Japanese Garden website, you will see the symbol at the center of the tile. The “g” around it most likely stands for garden. I believe the symbol, from looking at their main webpage, is a stylized Japanese stone lantern.

Very very difficult to photograph with the lens I was using…..

We had descended and now had to ascend back to get to the exit….