My (our) Japanes inspired oriental garden.

When I moved to Chesterfield half of the garden at the house looked liked this.

 Hubby wanted to create a low maintenance oriental inspired gaden. We had a lot of concrete to contend with as the whole space had been taken up with hubbys model train set.

It had been his hobby, making all the models himself, before he became very ill with facial cancer. On the long road to recovery Hubby had to dismantle and sell off his precious boy toy. I took one look and thought 'this is do-able!'
 So we set about creating a design.

The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden,

This is a pic of Buddha Maitreyas award winning garden

When the Japanese design a dry landscape garden they will usually start with the stones and rocks. Today these cannot be simply purloined from the wild, and they are usually recycled or reclaimed from elsewhere. The shape, size and colour of these raw materials will dictate the way the garden develops, and they will be arranged according to the fundamental concept of Japanese gardens to create the feeling of a landscape. The rocks may symbolise land or an island, other carefully selected stones may be positioned skilfully to represent a waterfall, and smoothly raked gravel designed to represent the sea, broad river or lake surrounding it.

The plants are then chosen to accompany the hard landscape; for instance irises may be planted on the “banks” of the water. The growing material comes in as a secondary stage.

A japanese person often find British interpretation of their style of gardening as highly amusing and burts into a fit of giggles. They view their gardening completely different from ours. So knowing this our garden is a) mainly maintenance free,b) relaxing to look at c) with a mere nodd to the japanese way of gardening.

I painted the fences black and Husband did all the hard labour

 Husband Dave was inspired by the Pureland Meditation Centre and Japanese garden created by Buddha Maitreya, near Newark In Nottinghamshire. He took me there on a visit. It is a wonderful place, not leat because the craftmanship of the gardener is a joy to behold, but the koi carp come up to say hello to you at the pond side- And the crystal garden is amazing. Check out the link below. It is really beautiful.

http://www.buddhamaitreya.co.uk










It was  hard act to follow but we used it as our inspiration and set to work.




We had to work around the patches of concrete. We cleared the area , added a rectangle of white shale and positoned a Buddha and an alibaster pagoda.

Ollie inspecting the work so far

The shale/stones represent the japanese islands. 

We paved around the existing pond, it has a lovely waterfall and I got to work on the planting. We bought some bamboo poles and hubby made and positioned a 'sculpture'.

Bamboo poles top left - its beginning to take shape.

 I brought the bamboo plant all the way from Wales to put next to it. It took a few months but  working methodically we like the final result.

We like it, especially as its something we accomplished together.I potter around with different plants every year- it suits us both and is much better than what existed previously.

We enjoyed our selves so much we now volunteer at Inspire Community off Ashgate road, where there is a jolly bunch of people who have transformed a piece of wasted ground into a lovely informational area that is open to all. It is a demonstration garden and the hard core gardeners all work very hard creating demonstration site for all things organic. All the progress which has been phenominal over the last year and more about the site can be seen at their website.: Inspire Community Garden Chesterfield.

The gardeners enjoying a well earned break at Inspire Community Garden.

 What is your garden like ? feel free to share on here.