Shunmyo Masuno

Teaches at New York Botanical Garden

Shunmyo Masuno is Japan's most celebrated landscape architect and the head priest of Kenkoh-ji, a Zen Buddhist temple in Yokohama. Renowned for his ability to blend modern design with vernacular elements, he has established gardens around the world—traditional and contemporary, urban and rural, public and private—in a wide variety of settings that includes temple, office, hotel, and campus venues. His design work is inextricably linked to his Buddhist practice. Whether in his acclaimed traditional gardens—Vancouver's Nitobe Memorial and the Yuusien in Berlin—or his striking karesansui (dry landscape gardens)—the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo—each space becomes a Zen garden, "a special spiritual place where the mind dwells."