Garden renovation in Chiba.

It is getting colder here in Tokyo, and autumn leaves have started falling. I feel winter is just around the corner. It’s time to place Kotatsu in the room. (Even though I don’t have a Kotatsu.)

During October and November, we had two strong typhoons in Japan. Both of them were directly hit in the Kanto region and caused serious damage especially in Chiba prefecture which is located east part of Tokyo.

At this time, I got an inquiry from the customer living west part of Chiba prefecture. Their both Goldcrest tree and Silvercrest tree were badly damaged from the typhoon and they wanted to replace them with the other trees.

When I saw the planter part, it looked too narrow to grow their roofs for supporting their bodies. It was a terrible way to plant this kind of huge trees in the small space.

I think I have told lots of times in this blog, but we need to think about where we plant trees carefully since they can’t move their position after start growing. We always need to remember that we are dealing with their life and should take extra care when we plant trees which become huge.

Since another tree, Japanese snowbell tree has died just within 2years after the planting by customers hand, they also asked me to replace it with the other one.

I surveyed the reason why this has died, and realized that soil quality was too poor to plant this kind of tree. I mean it was sandy soil and doesn’t contain enough nutrients for the trees like the Japanese snowbell.

After finishing the filed survey, I started making image drawing for their garden.

And it was the one for this time;

Sorry it was written in Japanese, I am going to explain;

I decided to plant small colored leaves for the entrance path part, and Spindle tree for the place of Japanese snowbell. I picked the Spindle tree this time, because of the space problem. The width between the concrete part of the entrance and wood fence is just around 50cm-60cm, and it might be too distracted if the Japanese snowbell growing bigger. Spindle tree is also grow bigger, but not like the Japanese snowbell, and also growing pace is slow under this circumstance. They agreed on my plan, and then I and So-kun(landscape designer’s son from Shanghai) started working for this garden.

First, we dug out the Japanese snowbell tree. The roots were not growing at all because of poor soil condition and also it was wrapped by white plastic tape. I feel sad to see something like this; We are trying to improve our environment with trees and plants, but someone selling trees don’t care about that. They just want to wrap tree roofs quickly as easy as possible. In my company, we always use materials that return to the soil so that it doesn’t make any harm to the environment and tree roots.

The roofs of the Goldcrest and Silvercrest were also dug up. Their roofs were growing not all the way but only two ways. And that was the reason they had leaned due to strong typhoons.

This is the picture after digging up and cleaning all the roofs.

Since we were going to plant small trees here, we got rid of existing soil deeper than 30cm. And the next, we also removed soil more than 60cm deeper for the place of spindle tree.

After finishing this preparation, we started putting soil into them.

At this time, we used black soil, which contains organic matter, and leaf mold which promotes the action of micro-organism and makes soil condition better.

Then, put the spindle tree carefully, and decided the direction and position.

After that, we started planting small trees. I picked three different types of the trees at this time, and So-kun arranged them at the appropriate position for each. The white type of Ligustrum sinense growing fast, so put alongside the wall. Then, put Nandina and Confusa to make good harmony in the garden.

While he was planting trees, I trimmed Fraxinus griffithii in the garden. Then, gave lots of water to the plants and finished our work.

This is the front view; I felt like this space became bigger and neat.

You can see the various colors from the outside of the entrance.

This is the close-up; they are still small but growing bigger within a couple of years.

Maintenance is the most important part to keep your garden clean and beautiful after making a garden.

Please let us know if your garden need renovation or good quality of maintenance. We are happy to visit your place.

Thank you!