Amazon.com description: Product Description: In a land where space is infinitely precious, the art of landscaping and garden design has been taken to its ultimate limits of expresion. Yet while instantly recognizable by their unique and exquisite form, these gardens invariably resist a straightforward intellectual comprehension. The viewer instinctively senses that their creatoin has involved an aesthetic and philosophy that are completely separate from the Western tradition. In "Japanese Garden Design," Marc Peter Keane presents to the reader the essential concepts and processes that Japanese garden designers have employed through centuries, knowledge necessary for a true appreciation and cultivated familiarity with these living works of sculpture, these sacred spaces for reflection, these ethereal and graceful gardens of Japan.