viz.

(Image Credit: Jay Voss)

Nothing sums up the best of Austin’s landscape gardening tastes like the garden at the Austin Zen Center. Located on West 31^st Street between Guadalupe and Lamar, the Austin Zen Center’s garden is impressive any time of year. Every plant in the garden is native. The vegetation in the garden never, ever receives sprinkler water. The entire growing space is focused around a gorgeous old live oak tree, like a dry landscape garden is focused around a sizable boulder. It’s only when you look at the Austin Zen Center’s garden twice that you notice the massive live oak isn’t centered on the acreage – that it seems to do so is only an illusion. Everything in the garden is clean, pure, and honest, and a steadfast commitment to these virtues on the part of those who care for the landscape has the effect of producing a space that is harmonious and seemingly balanced.

(Image Credit: Jay Voss)

The Austin Zen Center was founded in 1995 when a local psychologist named Flint Sparks lighted upon the idea of starting a weekly zazen practice for the community in his psychotherapy office. Austinites soon started showing up for their weekly dose of zen in serious numbers, and Sparks and his friend Bill Magness had to look for a new location, so in 1998 the group started using a small room in the back of the Clear Springs Yoga Studio. According to the Austin Zen Center’s website, within three months the budding meditation society was overflowing into the Clear Springs Yoga Studio’s other spaces. The group decided to form a board and systematic leadership, and the everyone raised money to rent a new place. In February of 2000, the newly formed Austin Zen Center moved into the house on West 31^st street. An extremely generous donor eventually outright purchased the home for keeps, and the Austin Zen Center has resided there to this day. From what I understand, the gardens on the plot are maintained by Austin Zen Center meditationers.

(Image Credit: Jay Voss)

There’s an odd way in which the past fifteen-odd years of growth at the Austin Zen Center is reminiscent Austin proper’s ongoing population boom. As that Zen Center grew out of the Clear Springs Yoga Studio, its members were bustling about and exceeding their allocated space. Similarly, the turnover stats for rental spaces and homes in the Austin area are impressive. The more I think about it, it’s hard to be cynical about these things. They just happen, and they probably always have happened. I’m sure some Parisians objected when Sacré-Coeur was built, you know? Anyways, what I find idyllic about the Austin Zen Center’s landscape garden is that it’s one shinning example of an Austin community managing insane levels of change. They do so in their gardens with peace and harmony. They strive to radiate balance and honestly. Maybe I’m wrong about all this, but that’s how I feel when walking by the gardens on my way to and from work. Take a look at the pictures in this post and see for yourself.