A Japanese garden is not all revealed to you in one grand moment. It's sort of revealed to you in stages. This part is often called the Zen garden. Its proper name is karesansui which means dry landscape or water mountain landscape. Again, obviously the rock placement is crucial. It's not something that we're necessarily trained to see. There are never any flowers in here; they're always pruned off. The classic kind of interpretation of this landscape is that it is a shoreline. So the gravel is the water and the swirling patterns of the current and then we have the headland from the islands and so on.
There are no flowers as it is thought that bright colours will disturb the tranquillity of the views. It's supposed to be very calming. The background is left blank; so it's as if they're drawn on a blank sheet of paper, and they are a bit like the landscapes that are drawn on silk screen scrolls. They use a lot of negative space when they're painting.
A similar effect can be seen when looking at the water. The rocks up close to us a really big and all the rocks on the far shore are kind of small, which it accentuates the distance. So again it's a vast landscape in miniature, collected here for us. The Japanese garden designers take a lot of care to replicate the patterns in nature; the way that the water arose, the land and the way that the trees grow over the water.