The Stagecraft of the Bamboo Fence
I’m a JGS member and landscape designer in the South West. This year, I was delighted to receive a JGS bursary to attend Ueyakato Landscape’s Garden Training Programme in Kyoto in April.
Ueyakato Landscape is a Kyoto-based firm that creates and fosters gardens across Japan and in Europe, the US and East Asia. Since 1848, they have been caring for a great number of Kyoto’s heritage gardens, including Nanzen-ji Temple’s grounds.
In April 2025, Ueyakato hosted their second garden training program for a small international cohort entitled ‘The Expression of Garden Space in Kyoto: The stagecraft of the bamboo fence’. I was extremely fortunate to receive bursaries from the Japanese Garden Society, the RHS, the Merlin Trust and Ueyakato Landscape to attend.
The course used the bamboo fence as a medium to explore the evolution of Japanese garden culture. It taught us how the bamboo fence (take gaki) sets the context of the garden, and can help us read the garden. And finally, it provided us with the practical skills to create screens and fences appropriate for the needs of our site.
The week began with an introduction to Japanese Gardens from Tomoki Kato, the company president and professor at the Kyoto University of the Arts. Kato’s talk provided a philosophical grounding in how we might approach our Japanese garden learning journey.
Ueyakato Landscape believes that creating great gardens centres around ‘fueki’ and ‘ryuko’ – learning from tradition whilst innovating to meet the needs of our time, where innovations admired by the age become tradition.
Crucially, Ueyakato knows that gardens are never complete. More important than their creation is that they are fostered with joy, passion and imagination over time. This is a key part of the innovation process.
Since ancient times, Kyoto gardeners have spoken of a 40/60 principle, which holds that Japanese gardens are constituted by 40% building and 60% management. Kato, and by extension, Ueyakato Landscape, rephrase this principle so that the term ‘management’ becomes ‘fostering’, a term that reflects the gardener’s love and care.
Kato suggested we pay tribute to the ‘unknown gardener’ who drives the garden forward without credit, and invited us within our practice to draw upon tradition, the team, and our own intuition
This was followed by three garden visits where we observed what I can only describe as “the canon” of tea garden take gaki (bamboo fences). These included Kennin-ji, Ginkaku-ji and Shisendo Temple.
On the second day, we visited a 120-year-old company which grows, processes and trades bamboo. Miki Chikuzai, company president, introduced his trade and the cultural and spiritual meaning of bamboo.
Following a demonstration of the oil removal process, we went with Miki to a bamboo grove and harvested Madake bamboo to be used for our garden construction later in the week.
There are 1000-1200 species of bamboo globally, half of which are native to Japan, it being the northernmost country in its range. As such, bamboo is at the heart of Japanese culture, stated Miki, being used for all aspects of life, from our daily needs – clothing and housing – to cultural activities such as gardens, tea ceremonies (chado), archery, ikebana and kendo.
Miki explained that anything that ends in ‘do’ is a cultural pursuit. ‘Do’ meaning ‘the way’ and these pursuits offering guidance to the Japanese as to a way of living. Bamboos’ growth habit also offers a metaphor for society and culture. Bamboos are connected at the root zone, and their stems progress up towards the sky.
Miki suggested bamboo is also a tool for self-reflection in the garden, stating that the Japanese garden comprises three key elements: stones, plants and bamboo fences. Plants are always changing, stones are a constant, while the bamboo ages over time like its visitors, holding up a mirror to them.
The third day began with visits to Ueyakato Landscape maintained gardens, Tairyu-sanso (see Michael Shapiro’s article in Shakkei Spring 2025) and Nanzen-ji Temple Gardens.
After another superb lunch, we spent an afternoon gardening at Dainei-ken, a garden in Ueyakato Landscape’s care.
On the final two days, we collectively built a tea garden, with emphasis on four styles of taki-gaki and key knots. Alongside the arrangement and setting of a path to the teahouse, including nobedan.
Ueyakato’s training program was constructed with the same mastery, care and attention to detail that they apply to their gardens, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have been able to attend. My thanks to the Ueyakato Landscape team and JGS for their support.
The course will be running again in 2026, and I would encourage anyone interested to keep an eye on their website and Facebook pages for further details in the late summer.
I look forward to sharing more on the experience and unpacking some of the learning on the stagecraft of bamboo in a forthcoming ‘Shakkei’. In the meantime, more photos of the trip can be found here.
You can find more on JGS’s travel bursaries here https://jgs.org.uk/education/