Traditional Japanese gardens are a turn-off Ever since the opening up of Japan in the mid-19th century, its gardens have fascinated Western visitors. Assemblages of rocks, gravel and a few dwarf trees have always seemed the antithesis of our gardens, so full of flowers, colour and a desire to show off. Many garden designers have described how they have sought inspiration in the ascetic dignity, purity and discipline of the traditional Japanese garden. This summer I visited Japan for the first time and, with a gardening colleague, inevitably spent some time in Kyoto looking at as many traditional Japanese gardens as we could. However, we felt distinctly underwhelmed - not disappointed exactly, but oddly unimpressed. It was Ryoanji, the most famous of them all, with its 15 rocks set in a sea of raked gravel - hardly a garden at all to our eyes - that made the most impact. It could be appreciated simply for being what it was: stone, gravel, enclosing walls. Visitors are engaged with a visual trick - it is impossible to see all 15 stones at once. Knowing this makes you walk up and down to see if you can, and to find an angle where it is possible to see the whole thing at once - you can't, but doing so makes you explore it. Many were designed to be seen from one place only. Consequently they are like stage sets, magnificent from where they are meant to be viewed, but two-dimensional: when you look around the sides, all that can be seen are the supports. Leaving the one privileged viewpoint, many gardens seem very sterile, with small trees and ruthlessly clipped shrubs widely spaced out amid bare ground - I was reminded of the sad municipal rose gardens that dot so many British public parks. Local Japanese gardeners have an exuberant love of plants (NOEL KINGSBURY) I found the lifeless red soil particularly disheartening. Every now and again a lonely perennial flower made an appearance. Perhaps the ground is meant to be covered in moss, but with summer temperatures in the 30s, it is difficult to keep large areas of moss alive outside of a few carefully maintained areas. Japan has an incredibly rich woodland ground flora: ferns, hostas and many truly wonderful foliage plants. Very few of these appeared in the gardens we saw. Many of the trees in gardens are painstakingly clipped and trained, so that they look like giant bonsai or the very windswept trees often seen at the coast. This can be an effective way of getting the impact of a full-scale tree into a confined space, but sometimes the shaping is carried to such extremes that bamboo frameworks are needed to support the weight of the branches. Some elderly trees are kept alive on support systems of such complexity and ugliness that I found myself longing to chainsaw them down and put them out of their misery. I couldn't help thinking about the connections between tree pruning, the famed rigidity of Japan's education system and a book on popular culture I had read that had discussed the popularity of bondage in pornography. The contrast between classical gardens and what ordinary Japanese people do is striking. Most people do not have gardens and so if they want to grow plants they have to do so in pots, arranged in a narrow strip between the edge of their house and the pavement or road. No ascetic purity or Zen discipline here. Instead, I was struck by how many plants gardeners managed to fit into such narrow spaces. Bonsai in various sizes, perennials in pots, climbers, tiny water plants in containers, all stacked up so that each one gets just enough light and space to flourish. Flowers and foliage are both clearly valued. In a few cases, the front of the house all but disappears beneath greenery. These little street gardens burst with a passionate and exuberant love of plants. There is a lot that gardeners in other urban areas can learn from here. The traditional gardens beloved by the intellectual visitor may be respected, but the Japanese, it seems, don't particularly want them for themselves.