Saikei
[3] A saikei landscape will remind the viewer of a natural location through its overall topography, choice of ground materials, and the species used in its plantings.
In general, saikei concentrates on the evocation of a natural living landscape, rather than on the character of individual trees as emphasized in bonsai.
Mixed vegetation, including grasses and small flowering plants, make the saikei a more complex living image than the more ascetic-looking bonsai.
Saikei designs, on the other hand, are firmly based on a physical layout of stones and imaginative groundscaping, less so on the trunk shape, branch placement, and trimmed foliage of the small trees located thereupon.
At the time Kawamoto began developing the rules and form of saikei, the practice of bonsai was at a critical low point in Japan.
[7] Post-war economic conditions made the purchase and cultivation of a real bonsai almost impossible for average Japanese households.
Saikei was a way for inexpensive plants and stones to be brought together in a pleasing arrangement, easily accessible to the average person.
Similarly, hòn non bộ emphasizes the creation of stylized miniature islands projecting from a body of water and carrying a burden of trees and other plants.
A saikei container provides liberal quantities of soil, easing the burden of careful watering and root pruning that mark bonsai cultivation.
The trees themselves do not require a great deal of shaping or other manipulation, compared to bonsai's complex and time-consuming development practices.
[citation needed] A saikei display does contain numerous living plants, however, and requires growing conditions that allow them to thrive.
Saikei containing plants that require outdoor conditions will be grown and displayed out of doors, possibly with special protection in winter months.
Trees can appear singly or in groups at any suitable spot in the landscape, even on the sides and tops of rocks representing mountains or hills.
The bonsai plantings are generally developed to display a unified silhouette involving all the trees, in which they produce a single foliage mass behind and to the left and right of the trunks.
A saikei must contain rocks, which may play the role of mountains, cliff faces, stone outcroppings, stream beds, shorelines, or other aspects of the landscape.
Spring leaves and flowers, summer fruit, autumn coloration and leaf-fall, and the contrast of bare-branched deciduous trees with snow-covered evergreens can represent the annual cycle of an entire garden in the space of a tea-table.
Saikei displays can span a range extending from the austerity of a classic bonsai to the richness of a Japanese garden in miniature.
The saikei designer can suggest wabi or sabi with a simple planting among aged and weathered rocks, or evoke an entire mountain forest with multiple peaks, trees, seasonal flowers and grasses, ground cover, and moss.
Some saikei even span two or more containers, which when placed near each other create an expansive and complex image (as seen, for example, in the photograph above, labeled 'Trees, soil, and rocks form a miniature living landscape').
A saikei developed in Kawamoto's style will be complex in topography, rich with vegetation, and strongly evocative of a realistic location in nature.
According to Kawamoto, "[s]aikei has no bounds; it avoids the rigid formality that is often evident in bonsai, lending itself more to experimentation and freedom in composition.
