The garden is the art form most subject to time — not because it changes but because change is its medium, the growing and dying and returning that is its essential material. To design a garden is to design a future that will not arrive exactly as imagined, which requires a particular kind of creative humility: the willingness to be revised by weather, season, and the will of growing things. The Heian garden, the Zen garden, the English landscape — all are attempts to hold nature in a form that honors its impermanence without resisting it.
Each step builds on the last.