Serving Nanaimo & Area
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We love Japanese-inspired gardens, and providing design and installation at this new home was a joy for our team.
This garden was installed at a new home on a gorgeous rural property. We were lucky to have some great site prep completed by the time we arrived, including most of the soil placement and all the large boulder placements.
The components for this garden are intentionally (and deceptively) simple:
The natural stone provides the negative space necessary for the feel of this space.
Initial phases of this project were completed in November of 2021. This site has a lot more planned, and we’ll update this page as the garden evolves and blooms through the seasons.
The main inspiration for this garden came from the client's house itself.
Immediately upon approach, one is struck by the long clean lines of the yellow cedar boardwalk, the geometry of the paving stones, and the hint of Japanese inspiration in the building layout.
The garden is loosely inspired by the Japanese tradition of Tsukiyama, or hill gardens.
We highlight this inspiration by incorporating many slight elevation changes, stone mulch, ample accent stones placed throughout the garden, and many trees planted with the intention of watching a small forest grow here over the years.
This garden will see many months of colour, even with a deliberately restricted plant palette.
Every aspect of this garden is intentional, including a plant palette that is reduced to only a handful of species.
North Arrow Landscapes is known for naturalistic designs with spontaneous, wall-to-wall, complex plantings. This garden was a wonderful and unique opportunity to blend our approach with the meticulous Japanese garden aesthetic.
This garden embraces open and negative space, and the gravel layer and sandstone boulders make this openness possible without seeming barren.
Even with its deliberately restricted plant palette, this garden will see many months of colour, with a strong evergreen presence and gorgeous branch architecture in the trees and shrubs.
While inspired by Japanese-style gardens, we brought a lot of our own character to the design.
Where a traditional Japanese garden utilizes moss as a ground cover, we held true to our roots with a dense perennial planting, utilizing different heights, forms, textures, and colours. The mulch layer will become all but invisible when the plants are mature.
Pruning work and young tree training will continue over the coming years to generate a controlled, Bonsai-like aesthetic in the trees and shrubs. This will also allow for veiled sight lines through the landscape, which is a critical component of this landscape design.
The fractured gravel has been used as a stone mulch, and as a pathway material connecting the breezeway with the front deck.
The pathway is not strongly delineated, and passage is allowed only by the absence of plants or boulders.
The mulch layer will become all but invisible when the plants are mature.