The Stagecraft of the Bamboo Fence Course participants and Ueyakato staff at Tairyu-Sanso Garden. Photocredit: ©Ueyakato Landscape, Photos: Yujiro Sagami I’m a JGS member and landscape designer in the South West. This year, I was delighted to receive a JGS bursary to attend Ueyakato Landscape’s Garden Training Programme in Kyoto in April. Ueyakato Landscape is […]
The Stagecraft of the Bamboo Fence Read More »
With Senior Gardener Steve Candy from Kingston Lacy Snowdrop planting. Here at Kingston Lacy, vast swathes of snowdrops have appeared and over the next few weeks we will be planting more to improve the display. These beautiful plants may not necessarily lend themselves to your own Japanese gardens but here we love to plant pockets
Jobs of the month – March 2024 Read More »
Jobs of the Month, With Senior Gardener Steve Candy from Kingston Lacy Continue with the endless leaf clearing. We like to leave circles of leaves in the short term around prominent Acers or other specimen trees. Only removing once they leaf litter may cause damage to the grass or moss underneath. Clear gutters on Teahouses
Jobs in the Japanese garden – December Read More »
A place to sit, drink tea and read verse A place to sit, drink tea and read verse If you live in beautiful scenery, you really need a place to admire it. It is the very spirit of ‘Shakkei’ or borrowed scenery. I want to see the scenery in comfort. In another blog post on
A Japanese shelter Read More »
In the last post I described how difficult it is to grow some of the traditional plants of a Japanese garden in my garden – especially Acer Japonicum which dislikes exposure to wind, and flowering cherry because the blossom wouldn’t last five minutes. I am therefore experimenting with other deciduous trees. Deciduous trees are used
I start to plant a garden. The summer of 2022 was not the best of times for planting. In June the moor was beleaguered by a cold desiccating east wind of nearly three weeks. It was followed by a July and August with hot dry temperatures also accompanied by drying winds. I had three motivations.
To be true to the location walls should be drystone. The Yorkshire Dales National Park alone has 8000Km of drystone wall. Road and field boundaries across the north of England are constructed of carefully positioned random limestone and sandstone blocks. For my garden moorland path to be part of its environment there could be no
Constructing the walls Read More »
If I were to have one book about Japanese Gardens it would be the first one I bought almost 40 years ago. “Space and Illusion“by Teiji Itoh is a book I return to for wisdom and inspiration. It was first published in Japan in the 1960’s and it provides a perfect balance of history, aesthetics,
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Mitate-Mono 2 As well as looking through Architectural antiques yards for decorative objects I have also been on the search for materials for hard landscape- for walls, stepping stones and pathways. Maybe some decorative stones will also be found. In the area I know and live, most houses have at least their external cladding made
Mitate Mono1 In this blog I will return again and again to what we refer to in the West as aesthetics. Just as in Japanese it is difficult to translate some words or phrases directly into English the reverse is also true. There are aspects of aesthetics that are covered by many words in Japanese-
