The Wet and The Dry - Part 2, The Dry
It takes a little imagination for a water feature like Mountain Spring to mentally transport a viewer to some other, more natural watering hole in the forest. But even if the viewer has no imagination, they can still appreciate just the sight and sound of water cascading over the face of a big, craggy rock and into a pool. That experience is elemental and accessible. It's another matter altogether when the water feature is conceptual — that is, when the water feature doesn't actually have any water in it.
You hear a lot of comments if you spend enough time in the bonsai garden. Mostly, what people say is very complimentary regarding the bonsai on display or the garden itself or a particularly attractive component of it. One exception is when some visitors first encounter the Dry Stream running straight through the heart of our garden, from top to bottom. "Oh," you'll sometimes hear a disappointed visitor say, "Too bad! The water must be turned off." It is incorrect to say the water is turned off because it was never there in the first place. The stream is intended to be dry. It was built that way. An intentionally dry stream bed within a garden setting is not so common in our part of the world, although they are becoming more popular. Oftentimes dry streams, or dry creek beds as they are alternately called, are built in gullies or drainage swales. In these instances dry streams can be a more aesthetically pleasing way to deal with a problem area of a property where runoff occurs. The Dry Stream in the bonsai garden serves a similar purpose, as the landscape was contoured to encourage excess rainwater to drain in that direction. When the rain falls, the water that isn't absorbed by the earth is carried off site by gravity via the Dry Stream. In designing the garden we could have dealt with drainage issues some other way. Instead, our dry stream bed became integral to the design as a unique visual embellishment.
The first time I remember encountering a dry stream feature in a garden was in Japan, while visiting a temple in Kyoto. The garden was old and beautiful and the dry stream in it looked as natural as could be. My conception of a dry stream before then was of a parched bed of gravel and rock somewhere out west in a place prone to drying out between infrequent rain events. This dry stream in the Japanese garden was something else altogether. The rocks in the bed were covered in moss, framed all around by lush plantings, dappled by sunlight slipping through the leaves of overhanging small trees and shrubs. The serenity of the scene made an impression on me. The memory of that experience was ready at hand a few years later when we were working on the design for the Bonsai Exhibition Garden.
One starting premise of designing the bonsai garden for The North Carolina Arboretum was that it was not going to be a Japanese garden. It might seem strange, therefore, that we very purposely invited Masashi "Mike" Oshita to be a member of the design team. Mike is an officially certified, classically trained, talented and accomplished Japanese gardener. He was born in Hiroshima and trained in Kyoto before relocating to the United States in the 1980s, eventually taking up residence in Weaverville, North Carolina. Although the Arboretum did not want our bonsai garden to be Japanese, we did not want it to be a radical departure, either. Just as with our bonsai, we wanted our bonsai garden to be a contemporary interpretation of tradition. There was no person better than Mike Oshita to make certain our new expression had roots in the right place.
Having a dry stream in our bonsai garden was Mike's idea. I was on board with it right away, remembering the beautiful effect of the dry stream I saw in Japan. I asked Bill Dechant, our architect, what he thought of the idea. Bill was born and bred in the mountains of Western North Carolina, a kind, unpretentious and soft-spoken person. He thought about the concept of a dry stream for a moment, then smiled and said in his slow, friendly way, "Well, you'll save a lot on maintenance!" Bill was thinking of the practical implications of having a dry stream as opposed to a mechanized stream of actual water running through the garden, which was another option we considered. He was right about that, too. Our Dry Stream has been in operation for nearly twenty years now and has never once broken down.
As it happened, the Dry Stream became a central organizing element of the bonsai garden design. The stream begins in the upper level of the garden, adjacent to the plaza and just off the north end of the pavilion. Marking its "headwaters," or starting point, is a sizable stone standing in an upright position:
From there the stream moves downhill, traveling briefly underneath the boardwalk. While the Dry Stream is not perfectly straight, it is fairly direct in its course. The serpentine walkway that carries visitors through the bonsai garden crosses the Dry Stream three times — twice by way of the boardwalk and once by means of a stone bridge near the lower level:
The Dry Stream is framed on either side by a border of large stones of various shapes and sizes. A few larger stones are also situated within the body of the stream. The bed of the stream is formed by smaller stones oriented linearly in an overlapping fashion. These stones can be seen as representing the water moving through the stream. (Curiously, Mike said he visualized the linearly arranged stones as fish, "swimming upstream to spawn." He overlapped them accordingly, with the raised ends of the stones on the uphill side:)
After crossing under the stone bridge, the Dry Stream terminates in a dry pool. Smooth, rounded pea gravel forms the bed of the pool; larger stones form the contours of its border. In the center of the pool is an island on which is planted a Parson's juniper (Juniperus 'parsonii'), shaped to look like a bonsai. Extending from the lower end of the island is a configuration of river stones arranged in an oblong shape. I asked Mike about that particular feature and he told me the island represented a turtle, with the oblong extension of river stones representing one of the turtle's legs stretched out behind it.
As an architectural feature, the Dry Stream ties together the several levels of the garden. The stones, particularly the larger ones, are visually compelling with their rugged texture and individual character. Over the years many of them have been enhanced by a growing, natural brocade of lichens. Garden plantings all along the length of the Dry Stream harmonize with it and provide a soft, living counterpoint to the hard, mineral nature of the stones. In a limited way, the Dry Stream might be thought of as a linear rock garden, although that misses the greater point. The real purpose of the Dry Stream is to invite people to a different frame of mind. We could have put water in the stream but left it out so visitors could fill it with their imaginations. There is a sign next to the Dry Stream at the place where the stone bridge crosses the imaginary water, and the sign states the intent of this feature succinctly:
Some people stand right next to the sign and say, "Oh, too bad! The water's turned off." Some people read the sign and laugh. Some read the sign, then look more thoughtfully at the Dry Stream, and you can see the wheels turning in their heads. The best response I ever saw came from an elderly man who, after reading the message on the sign, looked for a while at the Dry Stream before going through the pantomime motion of drawing back an imaginary fishing rod and casting a fly. He was by himself and did this several times. Then he quietly strolled away with a satisfied look on his face.
The Dry Stream was included in the second phase of the garden’s construction, which took place in 2005. It was necessary for the stream bed rock work to occur simultaneously with building the boardwalk because of the interplay between those two components. The space in which the builders had to work was cramped, and all aspects of the two projects had to be closely coordinated:
The steel understructure of the deck was in place at the time of this photo, and stones for the Dry Stream can be seen piled in the lower right corner of the image. The hole in the ground, visible in the middle distance, was the beginning of what would become the dry pool at the terminus of the Dry Stream.
In this image, looking up from the lower level of the garden, the stone bridge has been put in place.
The man in the yellow hardhat is Mike Oshita. Mike personally oversaw every aspect of the Dry Stream construction.
In this photo Mike is seen giving instructions to the backhoe operator regarding the correct placement of a large stone.
Mike knew just what he wanted done with each stone and was quite exacting in his directions to the backhoe operator. The two men had never worked together before and almost certainly never worked together again. After a couple of days the backhoe operator was exasperated with Mike and pulled me aside to say, “You know, I could’ve knocked out this job in no time if I wasn’t tied to that guy!” I’m sure he could have, and that’s exactly why we wanted Mike directing the work.
This is a trick of perspective, but I suspect the thought of grabbing Mike in the jaws of the scoop must have crossed the mind of the backhoe man.
Once the stone work was complete, the landscape crew took over.
A view from the upper level, showing the completed Dry Stream with the surrounding landscape mostly installed.
Two views showing the upper and lower ends of the Dry Stream on the day of the Bonsai Exhibition Garden’s opening:
The gallery below features various views of the Dry Stream in different seasons over the course of the garden’s early years (click on any image for full view):
