Borders or Bonsai?

Why would you want to create an English garden in Japan? For the same reason that you would want to create a Japanese garden in England – to experience a different type of gardening and to enjoy a different garden style. But are the Japanese and English ways of gardening so very different? Well, yes they are, but there are similarities.
Many Japanese gardens are very small, but so are many English gardens. Not every Japanese house has a well tended garden, and the same is certainly true in England. Beautiful Japanese gardens depend upon great attention to detail and careful control of the plants within them; this is true to a lesser extent in English gardens.
Japanese gardens use a very limited plant palette. Shrubs, as we know them are noticeably absent. Exquisitely shaped ancient trees, stones, moss and shade loving ferns and perennials predominate. There are no beds and borders and manicured lawns, and little in the way of colour from flowers, apart from the blooms of azaleas, iris and primulas. I was surprised by the presence of bedding plants in so many situations. Barakura uses them to add seasonal colour in best English tradition. Elsewhere they appear in roadside beds and in plastic troughs outside hotels, restaurants and shops. Even in private gardens boasting ancient bonsai, stone lanterns and carefully arranged stones plastic troughs of pansies seemed to find their way in to disturb the planting picture. To me this seemed one of the most obvious similarities between the two garden nations – this craving for colour at the expense of design!

The macro bonsai are remarkable; carefully pruned and trained to simulate trees that have survived the elements, whose growth has been controlled by nature, and that have lived through the centuries. Pines under a century old are mere youngsters.

We visited a Sake brewery built around a small courtyard garden dominated by a 350 year old pine – planted when the brewery was founded. This is certainly not a low maintenance garden subject – it requires careful pruning by specialists twice a year to preserve its cloud-form branches.
Imagine, if you have a garden with several macro bonsai, the maintenance is quite a commitment. This isn’t a job for a hedge trimmer. This is a task that requires dedication and extreme attention to detail. This is difference between the way the English and the Japanese garden. Japanese gardens follow more traditional rules: there is a right way to do things. The English have their rules, but most do not follow them. English gardens change over time and in most cases plants come and go – in Japanese gardens the main subjects are planted for the long term.
Hydrangeas abound in some areas. On the drive to Mr Ito’s nursery, south of Tokyo, we passed a river flanked by mophead hydrangeas as a far as the eye could see.

The temple near our hotel had a beautiful garden of rocks, water, azaleas and irises surrounded by cherry trees in a sea of long grass and white moon daisies – pure magic! Looking one way it was rather like being in an English orchard – in the other direction the red paintwork and shallow pitched roof with elegantly upturned eaves was unmistakeably Japanese.