Gardens

I’m sure many balancers have a history and progression through their own styles of balancing… Something that has contributed heavily to my own skill and style is the creation of numerous large to small gardens of rocks.. Many of my early gardens have less intricate balances, but more numerous “communities.” Creating so many gardens like this has logged 100’s if not 1000’s of hours of practice and experience… different locations, different weather conditions, different skill levels, different times of day…different occasions…. Rock after rock after rock for all those gardens has become essentially countless… the fun element of Garden building is the introduction of a more comprehensive dimension of overall design.  No right or wrong. just personal flavor.

Plotting gardens across 3 dimensions involves a little bit more contemplation blended with a certain “flow”.  Usually I pay more attention to height and field distribution as a whole…beginning with the tallest “nodes” and filling in appropriate spaces with a spectrum of shorter balances… there are 2 or 3 gardens I plotted according to a specific camera view.  But the rest were purely designed for variant 3 dimensional observation of space…   The exciting thing about gardens is the collective energy all the different balances combine into…  Even if the individuals are not as technical, the energy still flows strong with a variety of layouts.  Normally the photos end up capturing the most energetic angle of the garden… taking into account landscape, rock shapes… node distribution… light.. time…everything… It seems as if many beginning balancers will focus on one balance at a time with overly ambitious goals… My advice is try getting into a simple flow with less thinking and just start erecting less specialized balances wherever your intuition calls.  After all, Garden creation is an essential skill for performing the art (in my opinion)… not as essential for personal pleasure. Though, balance is good to consider in multiple dimensions… ;)

As practice and experience grows, so does intuition and technical ability…