Hiroshi Teshigahara Garden Design

It is commonly known that Hiroshi Teshigahara, the second iemoto of the Sogetsu School, was also a skilled and internationally renowned film maker. Not so many know that in the 1980s and 1990s he was also working in garden design. Hiroshi Teshigahara created a garden for the Ken Domon Photography Museum, in Sakata, Yamagata Prefecture (northern Japan), and also several Japanese style gardens for exhibitions in Tokyo, Minneapolis and at the UNESCO Headquarters Piazza in Paris.

The garden at Ken Domon Photography Museum was featured in the 1992 documentary "Dream Window: Reflections on the Japanese garden". In this beautiful film director John Junkerman explores the tradition of Japanese gardens.

There are a few clips from this film on YouTube. I'm posting a sequence in which Hiroshi Teshigahara appears in an interview talking about his garden design (it's about 5 minutes into the clip). If you'd like to see more of this stunning movie the easiest way is to make a YouTube search. I've also seen it for sale as VCR, but I don't think it's available on DVD.

The film music is Toru Takemitsu's music for a Japanese moss garden. Takemitsu also made the film music to Hiroshi Teshigahara and Kobo Abe's extraordinary film collaborations in the mid-1960s.

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