Forest Bathing

We’d landed in Portland a few days earlier and spent the first two of them out at the Gorge — Rivendell is from that stretch — before finally driving to the garden on the Thursday to scout it, and that’s when I found out I’d missed it by a single day. A storm had come through on the Wednesday and stripped the most famous maple in the place, and apparently once the leaves start going the staff take the rest off, so what I walked up to was a completely bare tree. Several of the other maples had taken a beating as well. I’d been watching colour charts and predictions obsessively for weeks to time this trip, and I stood there fairly gutted.

The rest of the garden was still carrying plenty of colour, so the trip was a long way from wasted, and I went back the next morning and photographed the bare tree anyway. That frame is Limbs Akimbo, and the structure of it without leaves makes a more interesting study than most of what I’ve seen shot of that tree in full colour.

I’d wanted to come here for years. It has a reputation as the most authentic Japanese garden outside Japan, and it concentrates into a few acres the things I’ve spent most of my life on — I’ve cultivated bonsai for decades, Japanese maples and black pines among them, and I’m a soft touch for a moss garden. Seeing all of that in autumn was worth building a trip around.

I went three times across three days, a couple of hours each visit, walking the paths and looking for compositions. A photographer’s early-admission membership let me in ahead of the main crowds, so every visit was a morning one.

While I was in there I didn’t have a word for what the place was doing. It was only afterwards, sitting down to work out how to describe it, that I went looking and found shinrin-yoku — forest bathing — a Japanese practice built around absorbing the atmosphere of a forest rather than moving through it. That was precisely the thing.