About Zen gardens
The Japanese dry landscape garden, karesansui, paints a whole landscape with gravel and stone: the raked gravel is water, and the stones are islands, mountains or animals crossing it. The most famous, at Ryōan-ji in Kyoto, has fifteen stones in five groups on a bed of white gravel, placed so that from anywhere on the veranda one of them is always hidden.
Monks rake the gravel with wooden rakes as a meditation: straight lines for calm water, rings around the stones for the ripples that spread from an island. Stones come in odd numbers and uneven groups, never in the center, in the spirit of wabi-sabi, the beauty of the imperfect.
Take your time. Rake a line, then another beside it. Press Ripples to rake the whole garden at once, or New garden for another arrangement of stones.