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Going Japanese: A Garden Design Dilemma

© Carol Wallace

My husband lost his mind at the Philadelphia Flower Show. Only for a few moments, and he seems to have it firmly back in place now, but for a while his sanity definitely fled. When it returned, he was the proud father of four bouncing baby bonsai.

He doesn't have the vaguest notion of how to care for a bonsai.

I have something more than a vague notion.I knew enough to realize that our house and current garden design are not up to the task. Bonsai are meant to live outdoors, for one thing. If they live indoors they want cool and humid -- not an easily achieved condition in our old, forced hot air-heated house. So they need an outdoor showcase -- again not something easy in a yard full of overflowing, cottage-style gardens where the main rule seems to be "don't let any dirt show."

A few urgent SOS messages to the bonsai newsgroups took care of my concerns about keeping the bonsai alive until they can go outside. But then the big question hit. Where outside are they going to go?

I made my raised bed garden while in a Gertude Jekyll phase, so it won't do at all. The poppy field, which failed, is now a jumble of daylilies and roses - most unsuitable. The big pond might have had possibilities had I not had an unanticipated success with my rock garden plants. Their very exuberance leaves me no place for the tiny treasures my husband is now the parenting. The dwarf conifer garden would have been nice, but the heaths and heathers I interplanted with them have taken off and there's no more ground space.

So, I guess I'll have to make a new garden. A Japanese-style garden, situated on the terrace outside my kitchen door. It is already enclosed on two sides by low stone walls, and we've been intending to resurface the ground there anyway. Lovely gravel and carefully chosen stepping stones might give me a good start. But my mind stops there.

If you know anything at all about Japanese gardens you'll know that they are as much an intellectual exercise as an artistic one. One core precept is to keep the personality of the gardener out of the garden. This frees onlookers to use the garden for their own personal contemplation.

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