Focus on a Japanese-inspired garden
A water feature changed our Japanese-inspired garden over night.
A beautiful water Lilly emerges from garden container as part of a water feature in a Japanese-inspired garden landscape.
Adding simple water feature transforms landscape
Most Japanese gardens are small, intimate places where simplicity and nature come together in harmony.
A courtyard works perfectly, but even a small corner of a larger garden can work well. The attention to detail makes a larger Japanese-inspired garden a real handful for most gardeners, so keeping it small allows you to focus on the smaller details that are so important to achieving success.
I think it’s important to add that a Japanese-inspired garden can be nicely integrated into a woodland- style landscape because the two styles work toward the same goal – a nature-inspired woodland. In this post, I am hoping to provide tips to help transition between these two garden styles.
The Japanese garden achieves this most often in an intimate setting where one tree can represent a forest of trees; a single moss-covered rock, a mountain. A small pond or raked pebbles can stand in for a lake, and a patch of soft moss becomes a place to rest both the weary traveller and a viewer’s eye.
Within a day of filling the water feature, this cardinal came for a visit.
Let me just say right from the start that I am, by no means, an expert in Japanese gardens and I certainly fail when it comes to being a highly detailed gardener. By keeping the garden small, however, I manage to maintain the area to an acceptable level, and reap some of the benefits a Japanese-inspired garden offers.
If you are interested in creating your own Japanese-inspired garden, be sure to check out my other posts here
A praying Jinzu baby in the Japanese-inspired garden alongside an art display of “Fish in the Garden” and bird bath. Japanese Forest Grass helps to make the transition from a more traditional woodland garden to the Japanese-inspired landscape.
Adding details to the Japanese garden
Although I am quite happy with the results, I know there is so much more I could do to take the garden to the next level.
Like any garden, this is a landscape in transition. The transition is in two parts: One is the transition from the more traditional front woodland garden to theJapanese-inspired garden; the second is the Japanese garden itself which is slowly taking on more traditional Japanese garden accoutrements from plants to art and the latest water feature.
This spring, we added two large Jinzu statues. One is pictured below overlooking the water feature, and another is at the end of a pathway leading from the Japanese garden into the back woodland garden where it acts as a transition from the two garden styles.
Transitioning to the Woodland
This Japanese garden Jinzu sits at the end of a path leading from the Japanese garden and creates the perfect transition to the more traditional woodland garden.
Another element of the woodland/Japanese transition is the use of Japanese Forest grass that runs across the front of our home along a pathway and under a large Japanese Maple. The Forest grass ties the two gardens together to create a more cohesive transition. Ferns (Ghost fern, maidenhair and Japanese painted ferns) complete the transition and look at home in either the woodland or Japanese garden.
Gardens in transitions
An earlier view of the two gardens shows the beginnings of the transition from the woodland garden to the Japanese-inspired garden.
Currently, the basic structure of the Japanese-inspired garden is intact: two Japanese maples – a large Bloodgood and a smaller weeping variety – bookend the garden and three boulders on one side balance the single one on the other side. Blue, squarecut flagstone surrounded in moss create a pathway to the backyard. Around the boulders, pea gravel creates the transition from boulders to flagstone.
Japanese Forest grass rises up through the fallen Japanese maple leaves in this fall scene.
The Japanese garden in the front of our home acts as a transition both from the more traditional woodland garden that makes up the majority of our front landscape and the passageway to the back garden.
Up until this year, a simple square birdbath straddling both the traditional woodland garden and the Japanese-inspired garden represented the only real water in the front landscape. It worked, but I knew that water (or at least the illusion of water) should play a bigger role in a Japanese-inspired garden.
A large black water bowl and a beautiful hardy water Lilly (see main image at top of page) not only solved the problem, but helped transform the garden in a way I had not expected.
A bird's eye view of the Lilly in the water feature.
The transformation significantly added to the restful, peaceful ambiance in the space. Within days, the small container pond even welcomed a special guest. A lovely male cardinal (see image above) landed on the edge of the container, stared at the beautiful water Lilly before bending down to dip its beak into the dark cold water.
A sign, maybe, that nature approved of the addition. Just a short ways off, a mother and father robin are feeding their brood of three youngsters. I am sure the water, in short order, will be welcomed by other wildlife as the summer heat takes hold.
The addition of the container pond and water Lilly, is the first step in the further intensification of the Japanese-inspired garden.
Two components that also need attention are a large black container in the middle of the landscape that has traditionally been filled with a typical display of colourful annuals, and two matching window boxes that are also home to seasonal annuals.
Colourful flowers really have no place in a Japanese-inspired garden.
Japanese Forest grass rises up through the fallen Japanese maple leaves.
The flowers in the large container have been replaced with a small evergreen tree that will eventually get the bonsai treatment by yours truly.
The flowers will be replaced in the window boxes by ferns and/or possibly more bonsai to take the garden to the next level.
Stay tuned for more details on the garden’s progress.
Below, is a small photo essay taken recently of the Japanese-inspired garden.
All of these images were taken with the Pentax SF10 film camera and the Pentax FA 28-100mm lens with Kodak ASA 200 film. The negatives were scanned on an Epson 500 flatbed scanner and processed with Lightroom and Luminar Neo.
More information is included in the cutlines for the individual images.
The addition of this garden Jinzu adds the finishing touch in front of the water feature.
A weeping Japanese Maple and boulder ground the left side of the Japanese-inspired garden.
Three praying Jinzu add a peaceful feel to the garden.
This colourful window boxes don’t quite fit in wth the Japanese style in the rest of the garden and will be changed to create a more simplified look.
If you are interested in how Luminar Neo can improve your digital images post processing, Check out my earlier post on combining Luminar Neo as a plugin for Photoshop and Lightroom.
For a completely different look at what Luminar Neo is capable of producing from digitized film, check out my review of the Pentax PZ20 with Luminar Neo processing of the scanned film here.
• If you are interested in purchasing Luminar Neo, please consider using the code FernsFeathers at checkout to receive a 10 per cent discount. By using this code, I receive a small percentage of the proceeds which helps me to continue producing articles for readers.
• As part of my ongoing search for companies that reflect the best environmental practises, I have teamed with Savetrees.co. If you are committed to helping the environment, you might want to check them out here. They offer outstanding paper products made from sustainable (bamboo) sources. Click this link to check out one of their starter packs.