Two modern Buddhist garden designs at the 2013 Chelsea Flower Show

After publishing six short videos on Buddhist gardens on this blog last week, you can well imagine that I was delighted to find two contemporary Buddhist-inspired garden designs at the 2013 Chelsea Flower Show: The Sound of Silence garden by Fernando Gonzalez and the Mindfulness garden by Martin Cook. Martin won a Gold Medal and Fernando a Silver-Gilt Medal – my explanation is that Fernando did not include flowers in his design. It is, after all, the Chelea FLOWER Show. My suggestion was that the wavy white mountains could stand in a lotus pond (following the traditional pattern of mandalas and mandala gardens). Congratulations to them both – I believe that Buddhist ideas have an illustrious future in gardens – less as representations of the Buddha than as interpretations of the Dharma. Fernando admires Japanese Zen gardens. They derive from Chinese ideas and I look forward to the day when Chinese landscape architects and garden designers recover their long-lost interest in Buddhist philosophy. That day will surely dawn.

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