The last time I posted a picture of a burnt wall, it was due to an unfortunate fire that destroyed a nearby restaurant. This time is a bit different.

The quietly famous Murin'an Garden (無鄰菴) near my house in Kyoto has outside walls that are quite varied and interesting. Some of them, such as those shown above, are wood whose top surface has been burnt to charcoal. Looking at a view showing the wall in situ you can see that the burning is clearly purposeful..

While it's clear that the wood has been burnt intentionally, the reason is not clear. My first thought – and still my best guess – is that it was done to provide an inhospitable surface for wood-boring insects. If anyone actually knows, please leave a comment, because I'd love to know the actual reason.

Here's a closeup...

Kyoto is filled with so much stuff that it's easy to pass by something every day and never notice it. I've been living a third of a mile from here for years and didn't notice the burnt nature of the wall until I happened to have while on a bike ride with Anthony this past June (the same outing that produced Life Stages of a Dandelion).

So, last week (five months later), I'm going by the same small gardens, this time passing their western wall just 20 meters from where I took the charcoal-wall shots, and notice that the wood is completely different...

I was walking with Paul Barr to the Nanzen Temple (some shots of which appeared in last week's Recovering Photos from a Corrupt Memory Card post) and had just showed him the charcoal wall when we noticed the completely different (and completely odd) western wall.

I took a bazillion pictures trying to show the amazing relief – sometimes almost a quarter inch – that made the surface of the wood more like a cheese grater than a wall....

I finally hit on the idea of using a shadow, so threw up my arm to cast one, and achieved at least a level of success...

You can also see that some parts are burnt, and that some burnt parts have clearly been shed, but also clear is that this is a completely different process than was done to the wood on the other wall.

The parts of the board sticking up are the knots and the wood's rings, so I'm guessing that the other softer parts of the wood were burnt more (and so more shed), or shrunk away over time, or.... er.... something. I dunno.

I think it's pretty, so here are two more views....

The wall wraps around, and continues east toward Nanzenji. Through the magic of my Proximity-Search plugin for Lightroom, I found this shot showing the wall wrapping around, in the background....

The blue “one way” arrow points right at where Paul was standing in the shot above. Anyway, from inspecting the wear on the wall all the way along, and from noticing that there are occasionally sections of two or three slats that are of the charcoal variety, it's my guess that this “relief wood” is the original wall, and that the charcoal type is some later-date replacement / repair.

Murin'an (無鄰菴) is a small Japanese garden that dates from the late 1890s. It's small – less than an acre – surrounded by city, but well hidden. I lived nearby and passed by for years without even noticing it was there. But when you're inside, the city just melts away and you feel as if you're a million miles from civilization.

Here are a couple of shots from 2007 when I visited with some recently-married friends, Kuan Fu and Verena...

More shots from that outing are on my KFC and Verena in Kyoto..

I don't know whether anyone will actually find them useful, but I've provided desktop-background versions of four of the shots above... see the links under their respective photos.