This lecture introduces some of Japan’s most famous gardens and provides a context for understanding the principles of Japanese garden design as it has evolved through the ages. The Japanese love of nature and the changing seasons has manifested itself in the subject matter of paintings and in the intimate and grand-scale gardens surrounding aristocratic palaces and Buddhist temples as well as Zen-inspired dry landscape gardens with their strikingly symbolic content. Nature and artifice are intriguingly combined in such examples to capture the very essence of the landscape. Historical developments and religious and philosophical influences have informed the Japanese approach to the visual arts. This lecture will also draw upon wider examples to illustrate the distinctive qualities that the Japanese have brought to garden design, an approach that has been successfully adapted to modern domestic settings and to Japanese gardens abroad.