White cat asleep in a moss garden

Gio-ji Temple in Kyoto is but one of 1,600 temples in this oh-so-beautiful Japanese city that touches the mountains. Shinto deities and Buddha co-exist. It is a tiny patch of exquisiteness in the quilt of beauty that is Kyoto. Gio was a great beauty who denounced worldly pleasures as a young woman and became a nun after falling out of favour with a chieftain of the Taira clan in the 12th century.


There are other stunning and more expansive moss temple gardens. Gio-ji, however, will always stand out perhaps because of the mysterious white cat who slept on a bed of moss oblivious to the audience of temple visitors. The umbrella protecting the precious Chinese peony from the elements and the ornamental kale adding colour at the entrance were similar little touches of homeliness in a spiritual setting.

You can see the bamboo forest bordering the moss garden and creating a luminous backdrop. We walked around the moss garden and our eyes soaked up the extreme green of the primordial moss while ever present water made music in the garden.

On the way back from the temple in the Arashiyama area we saw a magnificent dogwood in full bloom and then noticed these everywhere as street trees even in Tokyo. Our Japanese volunteer guide was bemused by the choice of an ugly name for  a tree of such great beauty. In Japanese dogwood means flower water tree.