Bring Zen to your Garden

What comes to mind when you hear the word “Zen”? Most likely you’ll picture a calm, peaceful, and minimalist nature setting inviting some form of meditation. By stripping a garden to its bare bones, Zen monks create a miniature image of the universe in its raw form. It is a “dry garden” with boulders, stones, statues, and plants symbolically placed.

Barbara Parisi, a Marco Island resident, has always been interested in Asian landscapes. When Barbara and her husband Joe moved to Marco in 2011, she wanted to install a Zen garden. Barbara can easily relate to the Buddhist philosophy of simplicity as she has taken courses in Chinese ink drawings that depicted Zen gardens.

In 2017, Hurricane Irma took down seven royal palms and mature trees from her backyard. She has always considered her 110 feet by 55 feet backyard a “waste in grass and it never looked right. In 2018, with the help of Joe, local landscaper Eileen Ward and consultant Eric Walton, Barbara was Zen-ready. She had a plan all drawn up!

Barbara and Joe stripped their large grassy backyard bare and turned it into an austere “dry garden.” According to Barbara, a Zen garden defies the conventional definition of a garden which is usually filled with groupings of lush vegetation. A Zen garden is filled with symbolism with rocks or large boulders representing mountains, trees, animals or the ocean.

In the Parisi’s Zen garden, there are 13 large ledge rocks representing mountains, adhering to Barbara’s lucky number 13. The ledge rocks texture, colors, and shapes have a calming effect on the landscape, according to Barbara, and Superior Stones of Naples delivered ten tons of thirteen ledge rocks. 

The symbolic river bed is dry, but you can almost hear the water rushing softly by tall mountain ranges in the distance. According to Barbara, ten tons of brook stone river rocks represent water flowing by tall columnar succulents, a bonsai fig tree and an avocado tree. These represent the symbolic forest.

The raking garden, measuring 20 feet by 52 feet, represents the great void or the ocean, according to Zen garden Buddhism philosophy. According to Buddhist practice, the raking process is not meant to create aesthetic grooves in the fine gravel but to train the mind in a form of moving meditation. According to Barbara, staying true to Zen garden design, it took three and a half inches of rice rocks for a total of 11 tons to cover the raking garden.

To complete the “dry garden” true to Zen, thirty tons of brown river gravel provided two inches of ground cover chosen for their coloration. A traditional red Shinto gate was installed on the left side as the “transition” place to the sacred ground. A red imperial bridge crossed over the dry river bed but that was swept away by Hurricane Ian.

Barbara added the statutes of Shiva, Ganesha and several Buddhas as gifts from friends, all giving a sense of authenticity to the collection. The Pagoda water fountain installed by Island Garden Center represents the only water element in the garden. At night, the Zen garden is magically transformed by solar lights.

Looking back on 2018 when the Zen garden was first installed, the succulents are now mature and fully grown; a few plantings have been replaced but overall, the garden has maintained its balance of simplicity. It is believed that “enlightenment” reveals itself through the careful placement of boulders, gates and the wavy patterns of raked sand.

For Barbara and Joe Parisi, their very own Zen garden is perfectly suited to their busy lifestyle. It is a thing of minimalist beauty and an aid to calm the soul, added Barbara.

These are the plants in the Parisi’s Zen Garden: sansevieria, paddle cacti, fence post cacti, night blooming cereus, prickly pears, Peruvian monstrose cacti, aloe, desert roses, creeping blue rug junipers, kalanchoe, pachypodium, false agave and muhly grasses. A dwarf bonsai fig, dwarf avocado and a dwarf weeping bottle brush at the edges of the garden are used to symbolize the forest.