#cloud tree

Zen by Tony Via Flickr: Day 68, Kagoshima, Japan: A great thrill for me as a gardener, was to see the gardens next to the houses. Gardens in the Samurai houses follow the Zen style. The rock garden or "dry landscape" garden, often called a zen garden, creates a miniature stylized landscape through carefully composed arrangements of rocks, water features, moss, pruned trees and bushes, and uses gravel or sand that is raked to represent ripples in water. The trees are called ‘cloud trees’ and are topiaried to suggest clouds in the sky.