My Zen Garden
My Zen Garden
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I was greatly impressed by my visit to the Japanese Garden in Golden Gate Park in San Francicso in 2001. It was one of the most spiritual places I've ever visited, and the ability of the master gardeners to create a space of such tranquility and beauty was almost overwhelming.
When Rebecca and I discussed ripping up the ugly, typical Fargo evergreen foundation plantings around the house, we discussed putting in rock or some other low-maintenance landscaping, rather than add to the already volumous lawn on our corner lot. But a typical dry-landscape garden is also typical of Fargo landscaping. I wanted something different.
That's when the idea for creating a Zen Garden occured.
Based on my research, I believe I
have managed to incorporate most of the key elements of a
Japanese garden in general, and a Zen garden in particular. I
have sometimes cheated a bit to accomodate local conditions. For
example, where I would have used a crushed-granite white sand for
my water feature, I knew that the the blustery conditions of
North Dakota this would soon be blown away. I substituted dark
pea gravel for the white sand, and created both an island and
watercourse feature using the darker colored gravel. I sometimes
refer to it as my Bayou feature, since it reminds me of the muddy
waterways of Louisiana, where I was born and lived for 30 years.
Rebecca also balked at a true bridge, however small, and even the least expensive little raised walk was beyond my budget. While I originally was going to settle for my small, oval water/island feature, I hit upon a solution that would give me a bridge-like structure and a watercourse. I used two pieces of black landscape edging to create what looks like the representation of a bridge on a map, and extended my oval water feature into a watercourse. Et voila', a bridge.
There is a bamboo pole awaiting planting of a clematis. Other plantings include a very dwarf mungo pine at the front door, a ground creeping juniper, a ground-creeping scotch fir (think of a cross between a snake and an Xmas tree), a Japanese Bayberry that I hope to train into drarf-tree like shape, and some generic, low growth rock-garden tolerant plantings including sedum grass and Irish moss.
While the garden is focsed on teh front door, it wraps around the front of the house, and is also continued at the two corners of the driveway. In the future, I hope to continue with a more traditional Japanese garden look (i.e., not a sarensansui or dry garden) around the far side of the house, along a path of pavers.
Here are some more pix. I hope you enjoy looking at it as much as I do.
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