Derry Moore, the acclaimed British photographer of interiors, gardens, and portraits, has traveled the world since the 1970s, amassing a portfolio of images that has signally enriched the pages of AD. But the aristocratic snapper—when he’s not behind the camera, he’s the 12th Earl of Drogheda, an Irish title created in 1661—had never been to Japan. That oversight was rectified last year when Moore modestly says he “just tagged along” with Monty Don, the British television personality and horticultural expert, and Moore’s wife, Alexandra Henderson, a television producer, as his companions filmed Monty Don’s Japanese Gardens for BBC2.

A view of the 17th-century gardens of Nijo Castle in Kyoto.

That doesn’t mean that that Moore was merely sipping tea as Don, Henderson, and the camera crew toiled. Instead, he photographed every garden that was visited for his and Don’s book, Japanese Gardens: A Journey ( Two Roads ), and had his eyes opened simultaneously. “I’ve always loved Japanese paintings, but this was the first time I understood Hiroshige,” Moore told me, referring to the 19th-century ukiyo-e master whose works of art—among them One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, a series of prints depicting tightly controlled, perfectly picturesque landscapes—mesmerized and influenced Vincent van Gogh and his fellow Impressionists.

“Japanese gardeners are such control freaks,” the photographer continues, noting how landscapes that appear magically natural are actually wholeheartedly manipulated, rather like art installations wrought, with great effort, in living material. “The hand of man is never absent from any part of a garden,” Don explains in the book’s insightful and amusing introduction, “especially when they want it to look natural.” That means plucking individual needles from pine trees to create an airier appearance as well as meticulously sorting stones by color and texture. The raked patterns seen in karesansui, or dry gardens, require a special gravel that is equipped with a natural clay binder so that the swirls and ripples don’t wash away when rain falls. Says Moore in a tone of wonder, “Everything is so curiously abstract: Really, they’re nothing at all like gardens as Westerners understand them.”

Another garden featured in Japanese Gardens: A Journey (Two Roads).

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Now that Japan’s horticultural glories are behind him, what’s up next for the photographer? “A book about American gardens,” Moore says, adding that he recently traveled from Miami to Charleston, South Carolina, to Oak Spring Farm in Upperville, Virginia—the rural home of Bunny Mellon, his onetime mother-in-law—in search of stateside beauty.