THEMES IN THE HISTORY OF JAPANESE GARDEN ART, by Wybe Kuitert. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002, 284 pp., including 25 pp. of color plates and 72 pp. black-and-white photos, drawings and plans, $50 (cloth)

LANDSCAPE GARDENING IN JAPAN, by Josiah Conder, with a foreword by Azby Brown and an afterword by Terunobu Fujimori. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2002, 248 pp., including 40 pp. of plates and 55 pp. of figures, 3,900 yen (cloth)

THE ART OF SETTING STONES AND OTHER WRITINGS FROM THE JAPANESE GARDEN, by Marc Peter Keane. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2002, 154 pp., including 8 pp. of illustrations, $16.95 (paper)

Though he was describing a different kind of garden, Isaac Watts, an 18th-century English minister and composer of hymns, could have been thinking of Japan when he wrote: "We are a garden walled around, / Chosen and made peculiar ground; / A little spot enclosed by grace, / Out of the world's wide wilderness."