Vlastimil Kastner looks like he just woke up from a long nap on a hot day. He’s unshaven and his arms are thicker and darker than average. His eyes have a steady aim, the pupils wild and bold. His white hair is a little wild too. I wonder if this is how all garden architects look and act.

“We live in an overly technical society,” he explained, very tired. “After work people want to relax. They want to spend time in a peaceful and natural place.”
Like a Japanese garden? I asked.

“Like a Japanese garden,” he repeated.

We are at his Bambus Centrum garden business. We walk around a brownish pond he designed with boulders parked around its shores and reeds sticking up like straw clusters. We then stroll around another pond, this one “dry” – a Zen garden, the gravel raked, the scattered boulders like submerged islands. In the functional part of the center, rows of bonsai wait to be sold, all fantastic shapes and sizes futilely trying to twist and squirm their way out of their rows and pots. Kastner slowly scans his creation and arrangements, his pruning and positioning.

I lived in Japan for many years, more than his five. I too gazed at and strolled around the gardens of Katsura Rikyu, Kiyomizudera, Nijo-jo, etc. Kastner just blinks and smiles when I speak to him in Japanese. For some reason I feel like playing devil’s advocate.

Aren’t Czech gardens peaceful and natural enough, I asked, especially when they are out in the country and part of cottages. Isn’t a garden a garden? What is it that makes a Japanese garden so special?

He looks into the distance. He looks into his tanks, the pretty koi blurry under the swirling water, slowly swimming, near the bottom. “A Japanese garden…” he sighs. “A Japanese garden is meant..to…calm the senses in subtle ways. It kind of hugs you. It humbles you. It’s meant to induce meditation and focus your attention on the details.”

His eyes widen. He’s looking curiously at me again. I know why he looks like this. He’s very busy. He’s exhausted. He lifts, digs, and snips all day, every day. “There’s a certain energy in a Japanese garden,” he said. “It’s like entering a cathedral.”

He’s got me remembering, agreeing, actually. Japanese gardens don’t harbor compost heaps. They don’t feature vegetable patches or deep wells with action pump handles. A Japanese garden is not meant to bloom with wild flowers or serve as a cool place to BBQ on weekends or supply hearty rations for the upcoming winter.

I sit back in the sun and admire the rocks, surreally shaped and colored. Several are huge, sensuous giants lolling on the plains, bigger than the smoky blue smudge of mountains in the distance. I don’t remember any of the rocks in Ryouanji being so big, rising above temple walls like Venuses out of their shells. I point to one behemoth.

How much does that thing weigh?
“122 tons.”
How do you move them?
“Trucks, cranes, helicopter. Depends on the client.”

He rubs his index finger and calloused thumb together in that universal way to signify money. He and his team can design and set something up on your very doorstep. The whole shebang: pond, bridge over pond, goldfish in pond (in any autumn colored variety), rocks and bonsai nestled brotherly, gravel to be raked, flat stepping stones embedded into gravel, stepping stones’ surface smoothe enough to walk across barefoot.

“Before starting,” he said, “I have to form a connection to the people and the plot in question. The plot in question… it could be a couple of hectares or this big.” He pinches the air in front of him and squints.
How do you form this connection exactly?
“Like this…”
Kastner becomes cobra eyed again, swaying, drunken, about to strike. I have to look away again.
“A monk taught me how to do this.”

He laughs. His eyes dart behind an eclipse of threeday shadow, wide and contemplating me from another century, the Edo Period perhaps. And with his tousled hair, complaining that he works too much (from “4 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day”), with the topiary trees forming high walls that hedge us in, he reminds me of Jack Nicholson in the latter half of The Shining. But this guy doesn’t scare me. Eccentricity is the norm for anyone whose business is shipping boulders around the ocean and stunting things.

Business started in the heyday of the early 1990s.

To describe his business’ growth, he gestured in concentric wave motions, his sunburnt arms slowly circling outwards like an expanding universe. “Destruktivní”, he said in Czech to describe the growth, which I can easily understand, since the word derives from English.

For decades under communism, Kastner was working for the Botanical Institute, planting those mandatory stick trees and grass rectangles around block-apartment complexes. He was almost jailed for repeatedly communicating with the Japanese Embassy about his secret passion, a dissident like Václav Havel or Ivan Klíma, but in the bamboo arena, not literary.

More silence. One customer admires a bonsai that has a ridiculously long main branch with no bamboo support underneath, the main branch extending in a gravitydefying, totally horizontal way, like a drifting green cloud dispersing as it stretches out. Some of the bonsai are taller than basketball players; some have thick black gnarly roots more twisted than a Stephen King novel; some look like they’ve been imprisoned for multiple life sentences; some look like wintergreen lollipops, stuck one on top of another. Everything is imported from Hokkaido and Japan’s northern regions to insure the plants continue to grow in approximately the same weather conditions.

Suddenly Kastner releases a deep, bear-like bellow. The customer is preparing to take a photo of that ridiculously long horizontal branch. This in spite of a red sign on the entrance clearly stating “No Photos.” Kastner takes a few paces towards the man, plants himself squarely, showdown-like, and begins to move his finger like a metronome, tick tock.

“These gardens are not finished yet,” he said to the man, who was already scuttling away. “Not nearly.” His ponds look finished to me. Fountain operating smoothly, koi rising up and slapping the surface like clockwork, bonsai and boulders firmly in place, shoulder to shoulder.

Was it this crowded in the gardens of the Kyoto temples?

My head scrapes against the second storey of a fivestoried yew bonsai. A few leaves fall. It must be too dry here in the Czech Republic, I think. The weather conditions are not quite the same. Plus, this center is located right next to a highway. The constant car emissions must be damaging the plants. Or perhaps it’s all due to global warming.

He sees me looking sadly at the fallen leaves. His face engulfs me again, calligraphy ink slashing across a scroll. “This thing is living,” he said holding the branch. “It’s over 200 years old. Don’t you shed hairs in the morning?”
I nod.
“You think when you are 200 years old you’ll have any hairs left to shed?”
He then begins to shake the branch of the 200 year old bonsai, shake and shake. More leaves shower down.

“A garden is never finished,” he said. “It’s growing, changing. It’s never ending. That’s the beauty of it.”

As we make our way over the hunchbacked orange bridge toward a viewing platform that still needs to be tatami-ed and tiled on the roof (the tiles are being hand made by Japanese traditional craftsmen), I’m starting to once again become enthralled by dwarfism, by cryptic kanji, by stones that borrow scenery, by red pine and yew oh-so-controlled.