Insights of Japan and Japanese Gardens

As some of you already know I take a lot of my inspiration from Japanese gardens, and have had the good fortune to visit Japan on a number of occasions. I just returned from my most recent trip to Tokyo where I went looking for further influence on what I can apply in my own backyard.

What I am going to try to do in this post is talk about the things I observed, and the lessons I learnt in looking at Japanese gardens within Japan. 

The "Spirit" of Japan

Mount Fuji, symbol of Japan

The serenity of a Japanese landscape and the simple but deliberate structures of the Japanese gardens are what make the gardens unique. The two main principles incorporated in a Japanese garden are scaled reduction and symbolisation. In terms of symbolisation, there's no better place to start than Mount Fuji. Fujisan as it is called in Japanese is Japan's highest Mountain at 3,776 meters. It has long inspired awe and worship, as it was believed to be inhabited by deities, and is an object of faith for Japanese people and a place that their hearts draw support from. This is expressed by the official description as a Cultural World Heritage Site stating: 

"Fujisan, sacred place and source of artistic inspiration" 

I took this picture out the window of a speeding Shinkansen train heading down to Kyoto from Tokyo. Fujisan also inspires the principals around gardening in Japan by using it as artistic inspiration.

The garden is a three dimensional thing

Mysterious forest.

Looking through these trees you see these strange tangled shadows that peek through to a small wall and beyond. It has that mysterious haunted look. From the opposite sunny side (see Ground Cover below) they're just trees, but the path has been created in such a way that you can see two completely different vistas of the same garden. One side is a lush green patch of trees, the other is a mysterious spooky garden. 

We sometimes forget that a garden is essentially a three dimensional sculpture of plants, and that needs to be taken into consideration when planning. It's something that Japanese gardeners excel at.

Ground cover everywhere! 

Ground cover everywhere you look

You won't often see a blank patch of anything in a Japanese garden. Above you can see the extensive cover that was under those shadowed trees. It was some kind of bamboo related bramble that just took off everywhere. 

In fact I don't think I have ever seen any mulch (other than natural fallen leaves) purposely put anywhere in a Japanese garden. There's stones or gravel, or plants, or even manicured dirt that is daily swept to within an inch of its life. In the garden every inch seems devoted to having a plant of some kind that is perfectly suited to a purpose.

Think of the future of the garden, not just the present

A blend of all the elements

I was pondering this view above for quite a while, trying to fathom the thoughts of the original designer when this garden was planted. 

The configuration of this garden was completed in 1906, and although destroyed by air-raids during the war, it was rebuilt and reopened in 1949 to what stands today. The balance in symmetry is astounding to look at and is obviously well maintained to keep it looking that way. The vision of the original designers 110 years ago astounds me.

Everything is important

"Wow look at that fish!" "What fish?"

The materials used, the plants selected, the placement, the gravel type, the water, even the fish, all combine to make this a wonderful harmonious whole that is a Japanese garden. I think we can only hope to emulate this in some way. 

So when are you creating, you need to think where it's going and what it will look like later, not just now, and how it will look in balance with everything else. A hard ask.

Look beyond your borders at shakkei

I there is one thing I have really picked up in Japan it's that your garden doesn't stop at the back fence. Take a look at what's "over there" and incorporate it into the garden. If you look at the NTT Docomo Yoyogi Building in the background of the park, it looks like it is part of the park landscape as if it's always been there.

In Japanese gardening this is called "borrowed scenery" (借景; Japanese: shakkei) and is the principle of "incorporating background landscape into the composition of a garden" which is found in traditional East Asian garden design. 

The Japanese really take their aesthetics as far as they can go, so if you notice, the blinds in the building are drawn to match the shape of the building, completing the picture. Now that's what I call fussy!

Balance and harmony needs maintenance

Balance and Harmony in a Landscape

This tree has no doubt been trimmed to within an inch of it's life, as has all its surrounding brothers and sisters, in keeping with the principal of "scaled reduction". 

The lesson here is that if you want to keep everything looking beautiful and balanced, it requires maintenance to keep it that way. Think of the patience required to maintain a Japanese Bonsai tree, and then apply it to a whole garden.

Think big and make a statement, it's all in the perspective

Think BIG

Japanese gardening isn't only just about "scale reduction", it can also be about increasing the scale! When I saw this Japanese stone lantern (known as a tōrō or dai-dōrō specifically) the first thing that struck me was its size. It stands about 2m high and is roughly 1.5m in diameter, and stands on an island in the middle of a lake connected by two bridges. This thing is enormous, but as with anything it all depends on your perspective. 

If you are standing in front of the lantern it's monstrously big, however from across the lake it's the perfect size in relation to everything around it as you can see below. So remember perspectives when selecting plants or ornaments as you don't want things to disappear.

Remember your perspective

Framing the view

A gorgeous view

Take a look at these two pictures above and below. It might look like two different views but they were actually taken from the same location looking at the same garden, the difference is the frame in the bottom picture. I just took ten paces backwards and suddenly the view completely changes as the eye is drawn to specific highlights and views.

So I take away that it's a great idea to frame a view, after all sometimes you can't see the trees because of the forest!. Perhaps you don't need to build a pavilion like the one below, but I have seen plenty of examples of framing using internal windows to the house as an example, or even raising up a frame in the garden.

A framed view

Nothing is random, it's only the appearance of randomness

Beautiful natural scene or well planned garden?

Obviously a lot of thought goes into these gardens. This is Tamamo Ike pond, part of the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden in Tokyo. There's a philosophy that goes with Japanese gardening that is well outside of my shallow understanding, but the impact is striking, and I can only hope to achieve a similar effect by tinkering around the edges and what i can find on Google!.

According to Wikipedia Japanese gardens have their roots in the Japanese religion of Shinto, with its story of the creation of eight perfect islands, and of the shinchi, the lakes of the gods. In traditional gardens, the ponds and streams are carefully placed according to Buddhist geomancy, the art and science of putting things in the place most likely to attract good fortune.

The rules for the placement of water were laid out in the first manual of Japanese gardens, the Sakuteiki, or "The Creation of Gardens", in the 11th century. According to the Sakuteiki, the water should enter the garden from the east or southeast, and flow toward the west, because the east is the home of the Green Dragon (seiryu), an ancient Chinese divinity adapted in Japan, and the west is the home of the White Tiger, the divinity of the east. Water flowing from east to west will carry away evil, and the owner of the garden will be healthy and have a long life.

Also according to the Sakuteiki, another favorable arrangement is for the water to flow from north, which represents water in Buddhist cosmology, to the south, which represents fire, which are opposites (yin and yang), and therefore will bring good luck.

I wonder if my local council planning permits have space for all that?

Soften the hard landscaping

Soften the hard

I don't know if this was a deliberate act to fill the crevices in this wall with plants, or if it was a naturally occurring phenomenon, but the outcome was a terrific look that I think should be easily achievable. I have the great stone wall in my side garden and this effect would soften and integrate it nicely with some plants put into the cracks.

My only problem is watering them. I took this photo up in the mountains of Nikko National Park which is about 3 and 1/2 hours north of Tokyo by train. Up there it's always wet and moist with a lot of water flowing (hence the size of the guttering), but in Melbourne it's only like that in winter, so I'll have to give some thought to irrigating the wall somehow during the warm summer period, but this is definitely on my garden to-do list now.

Anything is possible

You can do a lot with a single tree

The picture above is of a purple Japanese Wisteria (wisteria floribunda) tree at the Ashikaga Flower Park north of Tokyo that I has the pleasure of visiting in May during the flowering season.

IT IS ONE SINGLE TREE! This is Japan’s largest wisteria plant and while certainly not the largest in the world, it still comes in at an impressive 1,990 square meters (or half an acre) and dates back to around 1870.  Although wisterias can look like trees, they’re actually vines. Because its vines have the potential to get very heavy, this plant’s entire structure is held up on steel supports, allowing visitors to walk below its canopy and bask in the pink and purple light cast by its beautiful hanging blossoms.

That is one tree that shows that really anything is possible.

What appears simple can be very complex

Simplicity belies complexity at Ryoan-ji

This was one of my favourite gardens in Japan, the zen garden at Ryoan-ji Temple. It looks simple on the surface, just some gravel and rocks, so it can't be that complex can it?

(courtesy of Wikipedia) The garden is a rectangle of 248 square meters, twenty-five meters by ten meters. Placed within it are fifteen stones of different sizes, carefully composed into five groups; one group of five stones, two groups of three, and two groups of two stones. The stones are surrounded by white gravel, which is carefully raked each day by the monks. The only vegetation in the garden is some moss around the stones. The garden is meant to be viewed from a seated position on the veranda of the hōjō, the residence of the abbot of the monastery.

I took the shot above from just to the left of the hōjō steps.

The stones are placed so that the entire composition cannot be seen at once from the veranda. They are also arranged so that when looking at the garden from any angle (other than from above) only fourteen of the boulders are visible at one time. It is traditionally said that only through attaining enlightenment would one be able to view the fifteenth boulder.

The wall behind the garden is an important element of the garden. It is made of clay, which has been stained by age with subtle brown and orange tones.

But even after centuries in existence no one has cracked the riddle of these seemingly random rock clusters that seem to float on the sea of gravel. It's been examined both philosophically and scientifically in enormous detail, with no single answer, and it continues to fascinate everyone who sees it, me included.

Now THAT is the essence of a great garden.

A beautiful garden is worth having

Even an average Japanese house can have a great garden

The thing that struck me most about the domestic gardens of Japan is the care and attention to detail given, no matter how small the space available. In some way it seems to be a national obsession. In my travels I saw some pretty average houses that had simply sensational gardens, and it seemed that in a lot of cases, even if there was only a postage stamp available to plant on, it would have some fabulously and meticulously sculpted tsuboniwa upon it.

Looking at the house above that I spotted while out walking in a small country north of Tokyo, the house itself isn't much to look at, but the garden was immaculate and well cared for, an obvious symbol of pride for the owner, as it should be for all of us.

Deck Building. Landscaping Around the Deck

So the deck is done at last, at least in terms of construction, now it just needs to "fit" in the back yard. Right back when I started laying the yard out I always had a vision of some kind of stairway to take me up from the paved area and onto the deck. However the other staircase I built already suited that purpose, and I really didn't want two sets of identical stairs off the same deck.

I needed some inspiration to go between the white lines!

Basic steps. What to do?

On a visit to Japan we went to Ōkōchi Sansō (大河内山荘 Ōkōchi Sansō, literally "Okochi Mountain Villa") which is the former home and garden of the Japanese period film actor Denjirō Ōkōchi, and is located on the edge of the famous bamboo forests of Arashiyama in Kyoto. This gorgeous garden is open to the public (for a fee) and served as inspiration for what I decided to do with the alternate path.

Below shows a great example of a path that leads up through the garden. The stepping stones are made from large pieces of local stone, and assembled in such a way that they look part of the natural landscape, but still indicate the path to follow.

A natural rock path disappearing around the corner

Periodically along the path you come across these gravelled areas as you can see below, set to resemble flowing water coming down the hillside.

A beautifully landscaped gravel path

From these gravelled areas the path then leads further along, using the natural stone as steps meandering up the side of the hill and throughout the garden.

The mysterious path continues upwards, one way

So using these photos for inspiration I called my favourite landscaper Stefan from Stefan's Landscape Design to have a look at what he could achieve. As always he looked at the photographs and understood exactly what I was after, and set about doing it.

The brief was to build a natural looking rocky outcrop with a stone path snaking up through it, containing a number of gravel landings linking the path to each switchback up the slope.

Two days later with a pile of rocks and a bobcat he achieved exactly what I was after! You can see below the landscaping prior to me enclosing the deck around it.

Now that the landscaping is complete I can enclose the last part of the decking

Once enclosed, the decking was now complete. From the circular paved area at the bottom the path goes up three stone steps to the right to a gravel landing, then switches back four steps to the left to the next landing, and then finally takes three more steps up to the right to meet just below the bottom of the decking, leaving one step up to the deck proper. He'd nailed it completely!

The landscaping and decking completed

He'd also included an extra gravel landing at the top as a lookout across the yard as you can see below with the gravel area to the right shown below.

The steps blend in faultlessly with the decking

Below shows the completed deck and garden area nicely planted with some ferns, mondo and dwarf pine shrubs.

The decking now landscaped in with the rest of the yard

The alternate path is now complete with easy access from the circular paved area up to the deck proper, but not in a obvious staircase manner. Call it a secret short cut if you like, because for all intents and purposes it just looks like a rock garden, but once you recognise the path, it draws you upward (or downward) to explore the trail.

The circular paved area is now linked to the decking via the rockery path

Unfortunately one thing fell victim to the construction, that being the back lawn. The bobcat moving back and forth carrying the heavy rocks and soil destroyed what was left of it. Truth be told it was pretty much dead anyway. Ever since laying in the turf, regardless of it being a shade tolerant species, the large pine tree slowly and surely started a war on the grass by dropping pine detritus upon it every time the wind blew.

I guess if I went out every weekend with a blower I may have kept it alive a little longer, but by the time I realised what was going on, the lawn was dead with the exception of one small area that was free from the tree. The bobcat finished the job and killed the remainder. RIP lawn.

RIP back lawn. You were great while you lasted.

What to do? Should I plant another? It wasn't a prospect I looked forward to. A little investigation and I settled on the artificial option, which would never die, well at least not for 25 years or so.

I went to a few suppliers and finally settled on a company called Synturf that manufactures the product locally. It does cost about 3 times more than instant turf, but they do everything for you. They start by coming in and digging out the old turf; then constructing and compacting a base to put the turf on, and finally lay and settle the turf on top pinning it down into the base and loading it up with sand to hold it firm.

The product is called Everest, and has a brown fleck throughout the grass that gives it a very natural look. Admittedly when some of the detritus from the tree falls onto the grass it looks more natural than ever! Everyone who sees it can't believe it's artificial grass, and it looks a million bucks as you can see.

The new lush green lawn is believe it or not, made of plastic!

So lets now take a trip back in time and as you can see below, this is the very first photo I took of the yard not long after we moved in. How different it looks now compared to back then. I remember we had to plant my son's Totem Tennis he got for Christmas that year in amongst the weeds.

Mowing the yard then was a case of getting out and hacking away with a brush-cutter. Things have changed!

We've come a long way since the beginning and the very first photo

Now you can compare it directly to below which shows the (pretty much) completed back yard. What a difference!

The completed yard sure looks different to how it started!

The new Synturf looks sensational, and the yard is now pretty much completed.

The new artificial turf has come up trumps

Below the deck is now ready for summer with many BBQ's to come.

All set and ready for summer BBQ's

Next time we'll apply a finish to the deck to complete the project.

Let's build the side deck step 1. Dig some holes.

It all starts with a plan, and below is the original detailed sketch I created for the side deck (see my earlier post on landscape design software). I had grand designs for an upright water feature with interconnected reflecting ponds. It would have looked beautiful with the dark pools within the deck! However in the grand scheme of things I decided against it and put them in the too hard basket! The plan for the joists was driving me mad and the low clearance would have meant a lot of excavation and piping to plumb it all together.

The grand vision for the side deck

I'm not going to throw it all out completely though. I'll keep the idea of the two garden boxes set into the deck in front of the windows and also the large upright water feature at the top opposite the double glass doors as it will give a nice focal point. The south and west sides the deck will be surrounded by garden beds between the rock wall and retaining wall, level with the deck to make it "sit into" the landscape rather than "sit on" it as most decks do.

Looking at the plan below you can see the final shape of the deck resembles a slightly lopsided T.

There are 24 posts required on roughly 1.2m centres which will support 8 bearers. The posts are 100x100 F7 wet treated pine, and the bearers are dual 90x45 MGP10 treated pine, cantilevered off at the end of the posts. The cantilevered ends are because I can't get in that close to the edge of the house or the stone wall with a post-hole digger, and I'm not in favour of running a ledger board along the wall due of all the windows involved. The only exception is the short ledger which I will attach to the concrete pad in front of the door to the garage. All the joists are single 90x45 MGP 10 treated pine on 450mm centres. The decking will be 90x19 merbau.

Side deck frame plan

For digging holes the holes for the footings I had a couple of choices being that I could hire a post hole digger, or I could actually buy a post hole digger. Looking at the number of holes I had to dig I chose to buy one. They sell them pretty cheap in Australia at Bunning's for around $360. Hiring one over the three days was going to set me back around $400 as well as having trouble getting it into the backyard as it's a cantilevered digger, so in my mind I was coming out ahead as I got to keep it afterwards. The only drawback was that the auger bit only had a diameter of 200mm, and really I needed 300mm, so I was going to have to add a bit of muscle to the holes afterwards.

16 holes done. Only 8 more to go. Time for a beer.

Notice above the yellow tool leaning on the retaining wall? A damn jackhammer! Why did I need a damn jackhammer? ROCK! Not the rock and roll kind of AC/DC rock I like, but the kind of damn rock that you hit when digging damn holes. All that white powder is pulverised sandstone.

If you haven't guessed, I didn't have a damned fun time putting down the footings! Here's a bit of a hole-ology (a new word I made up).

Concrete!

• Hole #1. The first hole in the corner I dug I hit concrete. The house is built on a concrete slab, and let's just say that the guys who filled the formwork with concrete were none too neat when they poured the slab, leaving a substantial overpour. I had to chip through with the crowbar by hand.

• Hole #2. I had a bit of room so I started the posthole digger. It went down about 10cm and then sat there spinning and spinning. Getting down on my hand and knees I discovered the sandstone. Not just a small bit either, this was literally a boulder about 2m long by 1m wide and an unknown depth, sitting right where I needed to dig the hole. So I headed off to my local Kennards and picked up the biggest M F jackhammer they had and started in on the boulder. What a pain in the A! Sandstone is relatively soft, so the pick would dig right down and get stuck. So I had to drag the jackhammer up, move a little left, and start again, drag up, move, repeat. Eventually hole #2 was done. Phew! While I had the jackhammer I went back and cleaned up Hole #1 from my manual work with the pick. Much easier!
• Hole #3. When Stefan created the area I asked him to put in ag pipe for drainage and to plumb it into the stormwater. Of course I hit it with the posthole digger and it got tangled up in the auger. Suffice to it ended up being a bit of a mess and the hole substantially wider than it originally needed to be!
• The rest. Thankfully The rest went relatively smoothly with only the odd tree root and small rock for the digger to hit and attempt to rip my arms off. A very rough start!

I had put aside two weeks to put down the footings and at least get the bearers down. The timber turned up for the posts and bearers, and I was still digging holes.

Delivery day, usually exciting!

Once the holes were down I mixed all the concrete by hand in a wheelbarrow with a spade, made from pre-mix bags. Roughly 2 bags per hole. 50 bags of concrete, and two weeks later, I had all the posts in at last.

This was going to take longer than I planned! Doesn't everything?

Well I said I had a plan..

So here is the plan! First up let's look at the block. North is to the bottom of the page, south the top. East is left, and west is right!

The house is a double story rendered brick veneer house sitting on a roughly 760 sqm block. The yard area is made up of the southern side of the block, what we call the "side yard", and a large area to the rear of the house, aka the "back yard". The back yard is dominated by a large substantial Monterey Cypress pine tree, and there is also a further row of large cypress trees along the southern border of the block, one of which (the biggest of course) is very much dead. More on the adventures of getting rid of a dead tree in a later post! 

All the major trees in the estate are under what is known as a Heritage Protection Layer, meaning "hands off", "don't touch", "don't even think about it!". There's even a fine system based on the thickness of any branch sawn. The more centimeters = more dollars, so above all the trees must be protected. I guess we are just lucky to be blessed with seven of them on our block! Ha! If you look at the large circle that represents the cypress, you'll see an even larger dotted line circle. This represents the "protection zone" around the tree where one is not allowed to build without permission, or else. It also takes up most of my back yard!

In the south eastern corner of the block there is also a hedge of trees that were planted when the estate was built. These are included on a covenant for the block and as such, also cannot be touched. You'll see them drawn in the picture below.

With all this in mind, I put pen to paper and came up with the grand plan.

Each of the numbered items on the plan that represents a section of work that needs to be completed. Generally they are also listed on the order that they need to be completed in owing to access to the block.

1. Circle paving: This is a circular paved area made up of sandstone "crazy paving". There is a circle in the middle which is to have some form of mosaic tiling where a steel fire pit will sit. Seating will be around the edge of the area, and on the northern border of the block will be an area to accommodate a wood-fired pizza oven. Delicious!
2. Back Lawn: This is a large lawned area. The area is "big enough for a kid to kick a footy around or have a game of cricket" as we say in Australia
3. Steps: This is a short set of steps to link the lower circle paving to the higher level of the lawn
4. Stone wall: This stone wall runs the length of the southern side of the house and splits the side into two levels. The upper level retains in all the large trees and the fence, creating a lower leveled area, level with the house
5. Side paving: This is another sandstone "crazy paved" area linking where the back deck will go (item 12!) to a path to link the side yard to another side deck
6. Path: This is a "meandering" loose packed stone path heading up the side yard. It features large wide curves to accommodate garden beds on either side
7. Retaining wall: This is a reasonably high retaining wall of about 1 metre. It will also have a large screen fence in front to separate the "utility" area of the garden from the more formal areas
8. Steps: These steps join the side deck area up to the higher utility area. They are also "crazy paved"
9. Clothes line: The old rotary hills hoist clothes line goes here surrounded by a loose packed stone area in the middle of a lawn
10. Tank: This is a rain water tank between the garage wall on the north side and the new retaining wall
11. Side deck: this is a large 30 odd sqm decked area dominated by a large water feature on the southern side that aligns with the double doors into the front living room of the house. The deck also features substantial garden beds around the edge to "blend" it into the surrounding area. There will also be a high garden sculpture featured just in front of the steps, to give a focal point when looking up west from the bottom of the garden, as well as a lit up focal point visible from the dining area beside it
12. The back deck. This is the big one! 75 sqm of multi-level decking to join the side and bottom yards to the door at the back of the house, and also the front of the house via the existing fence and gate on the northern side. There will be a landing from the back door, leading down some steps to the deck proper, and another set of steps leading down to the lawn area
13. Bottom steps: These steps will be integrated into the embankment to link the deck to the circular paved area below

So there you have it. Quite an ambitious plan! At this point I am planning on Stefan doing all the hard scaping (paving, stone walls etc.) and I'll look after the decking and fencing myself. Let's see how it goes!