Japan in TexasView of the GardenNothing lasts forever.It is one of the great pleasures of this career to go to various places and experience different ways of building, living and thinking.San Antonio has a sister city in Japan, Kumamoto, which was generous enough to give the San Antonio Botanical Center a Japanese Garden. Most of the original woodwork and fencing was crafted in Japan, brought over and installed by craftsmen and carpenters visiting from Japan.Then we found out how much termites like Japanese chestnut. It is one of nature's great reminders that everything we do will someday turn to dust. We were called in to replace many of the posts that had become termite food. When we duplicated the original millwork, I was afraid that our machined version of wooden copies of bamboo would look too perfect near the remaining hand textured ones. The carpenters visiting from Japan to do the repairs actually loved our version and insisted that we show them the machinery and techniques we used. (international crisis averted)Now, twenty years later we find ourselves back again. San Antonio and Japan have grown even closer with a Toyota truck plant in town so this symbol of international friendship grows in importance every year.The termites are still around, but after consulting Walter Gropius' writings about the Katsura Palace and companies in Japan that provide termite treatment, I'm not sure our friends would take kindly to dumping a bunch of chemicals all over the ground.There's a concern in Japan about using organically derived products for this sort of situation to protect the environment. Locally, one of our clients extracts the oil from the aromatic cedar stumps left after land clearing. He sells this cedar oil to his friends back in France in the perfume industry, but he also sells it here as an insect repellant. Maybe we Americans can begin to understand 1000s of years of culture and the Zen mindset. I'll think about it after the "Jersey Shore/Real Housewives of Tulsa" Marathon is over.....Business Cards for the Japanese Landscape Designers1994 Present DayHand Cut Chestnut Post from JapanTermite BuffetPosted by JR on 27th April, 2013 | Comments (39) | Trackbacks | PermalinkCategories: Kumamoto En, San Antonio Botannical Gardens, cross cultures, Japanese GardensTags:
