Sakuteiki (作庭記, literally, Records of Garden Making) is the oldest published Japanese text on garden-making.
[1] Sakuteiki is most likely the oldest garden planning text in the world.
The unillustrated Sakuteiki is the first systematic record of the styles of gardening in the Heian period, which had been the product of oral tradition for many years.
It precisely defines the art of landscape gardening as an aesthetic endeavor based on poetic feeling of the designer and the site.
[3] It enumerates five styles of gardening, including The Sakuteiki was written in a time during which the placing of stones was the most important part of gardening, and it literally defined the art of garden making, using the expression ishi wo tateru koto (石を立てること, literally, "the act of standing up stones") to mean not only stone placement but garden making itself.