Zen means finding your inner meditation. Finding a peaceful place- being in that place. No matter what religion you are, incorporating a zen garden into your backyard pool design will not only look beautiful, it will help to bring peace to your backyard get-a-way.
The Japanese rock garden (dry landscape garden or zen garden) create a miniature stylized landscape through a carefully and thoughtfully selected arrangement of rocks, water features, moss, pruned trees, bushed, and sand. The sand is raked to represent ripples in water.
The sand is essential to the rock garden; however, you can also use small pebbles. In the Japanese Shinto religion white sand was used to symbolize purity. For zen gardens, it represents water, emptiness, and distance. These are all places you seek to be through meditation.
Typically zen gardens are small. They are usually surrounded by a wall and meant to be viewed while seated from a single viewpoint somewhere outside the garden. An ideal location would be a porch, like the porch of a temple or monastery.