Congratulations to Marc Peter Keane for having his new book, Japanese Garden Notes, featured in The New York Times!
Here's an excerpt from the article:
"Just in time to help us understand how the Japanese achieve soul-stirring heights with such economical gestures, Marc Peter Keane gives us Japanese Garden Notes: A Visual Guide to Elements and Design.
I’ve spent hours poring over Keane’s past books; this one presents a distillation of his years of studying and creating gardens in both the United States and Japan. It’s an elegantly soulful interpretation of the essential elements of Japanese garden design.
A Japanese garden, Keane says, is 'a powerfully quiet place' in which human society and wild life are 'understood to be one and the same.' No one but Keane would take pains to sketch in the concept of Ma, the space between objects, 'the breath of the garden.' Even if you aren’t planning to build such a garden — though they have a lot to recommend them, since deer have not yet begun to munch on gravel — many of the principles Keane describes are relevant: placing paths off center to relax formality or creating depth by layering planes or harnessing the expressive strength of stone elements."
The full article is definitely worth a read, which you can find here: http://ow.ly/gRId30cgLGR