Then, at about 3am, back in bed at my hotel, I writhed, I winced, I convulsed, I groaned. No buckets of Beaujolais and fireman’s aprons for me anymore. To set the tone for this gastronomic odyssey, I kicked things off with a visit to a local eatery that served a particularly fine andouillette, an earthy, foul-smelling, divine-tasting sausage made of pig’s intestines I wined, I dined, I laughed, I caroused. It had taken me years to get there, and many hours spent planning meals in the local bouchons, bistros, and three-star Michelin restaurants. I had entertained visions of buckets of Beaujolais and tables groaning with firemen’s aprons (crumbed and grilled tripe), hams cooked in hay and sausages wrapped in brioche. All my longed-for dreams of La Grande Bouffe in Lyons were going down the drain. `Now it is perfect,’ said the tea master.”`Zen Gardening’, by Sunniva Harte, is published by Pavilion, price pounds 19.99.

`Simply Zen’, edited by David Scott, is published by New Holland, price pounds 20. I HAD BEEN throwing up for three days. He then grasped hold of a red-leafed maple, gave it a shake, and a dozen leaves scattered on to the bright green moss. Harte gives an example: “In Japan, bamboo grows thickly on the mountains and therefore it is natural to have bamboo fences and gateways. In this country, it would be perfectly all right to have the same design but with, say, chestnut poles, or willow, as these would harmonise better with the surrounding scenery than bamboo would.”Compromise is probably as good as we in the West will ever achieve, but even the masters find it difficult to achieve perfection in Zen gardens. Cave delivers up another Connollyism: “The son of a great tea master swept up all the leaves on the moss in the tea garden The tea master said, that’s no good Do it again.

So the son swept up every single leaf, and nothing was left on the moss But the tea master said no, it still wasn’t perfect. Harte explains this: “They are designed to be very familiar from one year to another, so that you can go back to a place 20 years later, and the garden will be the same. In a country where there were a lot of wars, people found it reassuring to go to a space that was a familiar friend.”One of the most important things about Japanese gardens is that not only should the elements balance each other, but that the whole garden should harmonise with the natural environment. Rocks should be as local as possible – Cave gets his from Scotland, rather than importing them from Japan – and it should be easy to grow and maintain the plants. The birds pick it up as fast as you can put it in.” Unlike British gardens, where one of the pleasures is to watch it mature and develop, Japanese gardens are planted pretty much in their finished states.

Dog turds on the gravel apart, according to Cave, the most difficult thing to maintain in a Western-created Zen garden is the moss that gives the stones that authentic rock-of-ages look “The Kyoto climate is a lot more humid than ours,” he says. “You can buy it in turves there, like we do with turf, but here we tend to have to buy it from flower arrangers and try to get it to grow in the soil. A dry garden should therefore be something that is going to be looked at, rather than lived in – perfect for the urban childless with a taste for minimalism, an aversion to gardening and a strong roof terrace to hold the weight of all that rock. They do not take into account such wild cards as children and dogs, with their own ideas about which way the curves should flow, or what should decorate the gravel. “You need to get a special rake made, and it is a question of raking it every one or two weeks, depending on how energetic you are feeling. The rake is quite heavy, and to create the ridges you must be careful not to pull too much along to the end.” He jokes: “It is said that the Daisen-in temple in Kyoto takes the form it does because a priest pulled too much gravel off the ridges, so they had to make it into cones.” (The perfectly formed cones in the middle of the gravel are now greatly admired and much-photographed.)Despite reflecting “nature”, these gardens are very much a creative interpretation of nature.

“A pure gravel and rock garden is ideally suited for town gardens, where people are very busy and stressed, and they want something that is low maintenance and restful to look at.” Philip Cave, a landscape architect who specialises in Japanese garden design, isn’t so sure “It isn’t as easy as it sounds,” he says. “I do think it is possible to adapt a Japanese style to an English garden,” she says. This is also partly to make them look “natural”, although hours of deliberation will have gone into their positioning. As Scott puts it, “the idea is to compress a landscape for contemplation in a way that is both naturally artificial and artificially natural.” A pine, for example, that is meant to represent a tree gnarled and distorted by the salty ocean winds, will have been rigorously pruned and trained into that shape over many years, and it seems unlikely that it ever got so much as a whiff of sea air.Despite an interest in the philosophy and tradition of such gardens, Sunniva Harte, author of a new book, Zen Gardening, takes a practical approach to adapting the style for one’s own backyard. The space between the elements in a garden is as important as the rocks and trees themselves, which will usually be in “auspicious” groupings of three, five or seven. When a student asked a master what the meaning of Zen was, the master replied, `Have you had your breakfast? Then go and wash your bowls.’” This sounds to me dangerously like the impenetrable aphorisms spouted by Billy Connolly to advertise a certain fish-themed credit card.Although we tend to think of Japan as a seething urban jungle, much of the country’s mountainous landscape is untamable, so the majority of the population lives in a small amount of habitable land. The Japanese have always revered their landscape and find a holiness in inanimate natural objects, such as rocks, water, moss, trees and shrubs.