Niwaki

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Niwaki is the Japanese word for ‘garden trees’. The technique of niwaki is more about what you do to a tree than the tree itself. While Western gardeners enjoy experimenting with a wide range of different plants, Japanese gardeners experiment through training and shaping a relatively limited palette of plants.

Trees play a key role in the gardens and landscapes of Japan as well as being of important spiritual and cultural significance to its people. Fittingly, Japanese gardeners have fine-tuned a distinctive set of pruning techniques meant to coax out the essential characters of niwaki. Niwaki are often cultivated to achieve some very striking effects: trees are made to look older than they really are with broad trunks and gnarled branches; trees are made to imitate wind-swept or lightning-struck trees in the wild; Cryptomeria japonica specimens are often pruned to resemble free-growing trees.

The principles of niwaki may be applied to garden trees all over the world and are not relegated to Japanese Gardens.