Making a natural style Japanese garden (part 5)

Finally, it has come to the planting stage. If you didn’t read the previous episode, please read them first and come back to this article.
The reason why I choose the end of the autumn season for planting is that natural style Japanese gardens use a variety of deciduous trees. They will make garden color brighter especially in the autumn season and also you can feel sunlight that comes through the leaves.
I visited to see a tree farm in Kawasaki, which one hour away from my place. A tree doctor is maintaining this place, so trees are healthy and strong.

I can just order and they would deliver any tree I want to plant in the garden, but I always visit on-site to find the “one” to match for my image. I usually pick trees I feel naturally grown, not like the one growing just straight.

After I decided which one I use, they dig the tree roots up and covered with a soft cloth made by organic material. Then, delivered to the garden place.

The driver was a girl(I forgot asked her name so I can’t write it here) who recently joined the company of tree farm.

I and So-kun(The son of Shanhai based landscape designer) were bringing trees to the right position carefully. Since I have a finished garden image in my brain after choosing trees, I could arrange them very quickly.

Although I didn’t get any huge grown trees at this time because of the customer’s budget, they will grow bigger in the future.

While making a natural style garden, using imagination is necessary since we need to figure out which direction each stem wants to grow. For that reason, we sometimes think a lot while planting.

At this time, I picked miscellaneous small trees which we can see in an undeveloped woodland area in Japan. These trees are living with people for a very long time ago, and we feel calm when we see them.

After decided composition, we had started to plant all of them.

By the way, leaf mold is good nutrients and also increase air permeability in the soil. Before planting, we spread out it under the soil and mixed.

After that, we gave lots of water to each tree. The reason to give water at this moment is to connect their roofs with the soil. Without water, tree roots can’t grow freely because the soil contains air inside.

This is the picture after the plant.

Trees make scenery drastically changed.

Last but not least, we planted a young plant of miscellaneous trees.

I prepared 5 types of trees, a total of 20 pots. They will grow much bigger after 5-10 years, and make this garden foresty atmosphere.

Planting was finished quickly because they were very small, and then, we started to leveling of ground. This is actually very important part of garden making, since it decides the geographic design.

Professional gardener Shiono-san came to help for it.

While he was doing it, I was making s compost system for this garden.

After piling up three of them, they can use it for putting leaves or food scraps.

When it became full, they can bring the upper part up and put it next, so that they can mix compost.

Because I used the same materials with the wood fence, they looked natural in the space.

And these are pictures after planting and leveling;
From the front.

A little bit closer.

Lots of tree leaves have already fallen, but still, I can feel autumn comfortableness.

Then, from the customer’s home.

Now we can see the way to car parking lots. I hope they will feel peaceful when using it.

This is the path of stepping stones;

I decided to add this path even it was after the designing phase. Accessibility to the white garage and compost system was much increased because of it.

And the last, close up of the intersection.

Both stones and railway sleepers were neatly arranged in the garden path.

However, it is not finished actually. After waiting for spring, we are going to plant ground cover.

We hope you’ll be looking forward to it.

See you then!