Finding Balance - A Work In Progress

This garden drives most of my friends crazy - they want it done. I can not tell you how many times they step into the backyard only to say - sarcastically - "gee, so many changes" or "wow! almost done." In some ways that sums up gardening in America versus gardening in Japan - time is the reward, there is ultimately no finished product.

There are dozens of changes, albeit small, maybe Lilliputian, but I cherish every one - every new moss, new fern, new pine growth, every new bird that visits. Slow change is a delight.

Some things go in this garden and I know they will change - I want them to change, grow, surprise me. Sometimes I simply know I have planted or placed with hope, and the plant or stone has other intentions. Time will travel them to where they must be and then the right balance will emerge.

Recently I began reconstructing a small section (above) where gravity conspired with terra firma to find their own balance - not mine. I finally followed their lead and rebuilt the entire section of stone, rock and plantings, keeping in mind their wishes.

Thee above image show the section reconstructed and washed.

The final step was to remove all the Mexican blue river stone (more to be added) and was it clean of winter's mud and earth that had fallen down from the banks that would not remain quietly where I intended - oh I have so much to learn. Silent lessons.

Finally to add back the life in the crevices and locations it was deciding. (all the small ferns and mosses were removed before I started the reconstruction and mapped so they would go back as close to their homes as possible.)

Giboshi in Spring

It's been far too long since I have updated my garden blog, especially considering after a wet cold early season spring has finally come, or at least the garden has decided to move forward regardless the wintry fronts that continually blow over the westhills from the Pacific.

Several new plantings from late fall and winter have erupted in shades of green - a half dozen Hosta (Giboshi in Japanese) varieties, several native ferns and a few Rhododendrons, and a striped bamboo a returned from the east coast with several years ago and had nearly thought was lifeless - a lesson learned about the eternal hardiness of bamboo rhizomes.

I have been working on water features, new plantings, finally decided on a fence and a deck design and preparing to build. Those last two elements pave the way for the five large stones purchased last year to make their way into the back yard. Photos and details all coming later June.

Couple of things to share. First a wonderful book on the Tea Garden, by Marc Peter Keane. Keane is considered America's top expert on the Japanese Tea Garden. This from the NYTimes review:

THE JAPANESE TEA GARDEN (Stone Bridge, $59.95), opens with an evocative scene of people arriving for a tea ceremony. "The important thing is that a guest be neat and clean as an expression of respect for the host and of purity of mind. No one wears jewelry or uses perfume or cologne, those being too worldly and distracting." Since tea gardens have had a major impact on the design of Japanese gardens in general, this book is a necessary addition to the library of any serious student. The rest of us will enter with humility -- mindful of the small door through which one must crawl into the tea room -- and sip slowly. The sweeping historical ambition of this work emphasizes the connection between social and economic change and the development of tea gardens. In the 16th century, for example, moss was a sign of decrepitude and poor housekeeping; that it went on to become a revered element in Japanese gardens represents "a paradigm shift," Keane notes, "as to what constitutes beauty." We learn that stepping stones not only create beautiful patterns on the ground and keep feet dry but also slow the visitor's pace. It's impossible to be in a hurry and expect to understand anything about Japanese gardens -- a lesson that holds for understanding life in general. --New York Times, Sunday Book Review, December 3, 2009 by Dominique Browning.

The other sharing is the website JapaneseGarden.org Great resource for all this Japanese Garden - maybe more than you thought you ever wanted to know.

I've been traveling for over a month. My life green and wet and all above 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Tropical rainforests, montane rainforests, Chenier forests, bayous and beaches. I returned home to a garden wrapped in clutch of winter, being pulled away from fall. Only the garden's pines and Hinokis, cedar and bamboo are leafed. The maples have all laid their blankets and fallen to rest.

Autumn Songs of Success

In the few days I have between Gulf trips the most perfect fall weather has blessed the garden. As I posted, new plantings and scaping have been in the works, but equally as joyful has been the attraction of visitors - avians - some just passing through, others have become as permanently passionate about the garden as I.

My office window faces the sunrise, overlooking the back garden and a scattering of bird feeders hanging like pendants off the porch and maples. Every dawn the garden is alive with song and chittering, and wings flashing in the first flickers of sunlight through the bamboo. Little lives reminding me I share this space and with each new maple and moss I introduced.

For those who follow this blog with mixed passions - love for birds and bushes - here is a list of garden visitors this past week, plus one mystery warbler and a flycatcher that eluded me in hide-n-seek:

• Black-headed Grosbeak (Pheucticus melanocephalus)
• Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum)
• Rufous Hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus)
• House Finch (Carpodacus mexicanus) - pictured
• Lesser Goldfinch (Carduelis psaltria) - pictured
• American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis)
• Dark-eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis)
• Song Sparrow (Melospiza melodia)
• Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus)
• Golden-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia atricapilla)
• Rufous-Sided Towhee. (Pipilo erythrophthalmus)
• Bushtit (Psaltriparus minimus)
• Western Scrub Jay (Aphelocoma californica)
• Western Tanager, (Piranga ludoviciana)
• Ruby-crowned Kinglet (Regulus calendula)

Perfect Planting Season

Changes in the garden are often more obvious to those not witnessing daily ebbs and flows of growth - my being way has helped me see the progress the past couple of years has made. The above photo (looking north down the dry creek bed towards the eventual pond) almost suggest something of a real Japanese sasso garden might be on its way.

Since I'm only home in the garden for a couple weeks before heading back to the Gulf I am trying to get as much fall planting done as possible. This weekend off to Garden World - ya I know, silly name - but they have an excellent collection of native conifers and near wholesale prices. The perimeter of the garden is missing a couple key shade producers. My goal is to add two Incense Cedars (Calocedrus decurrens) in the far right corner behind the single Hinoki cyprus there now. The trio should visually balance the grove of five Hinokis on the far left corner that were planted two years ago as the initial anchors. (Which after the initial first year heat wave have established themselves and are adding wonderful vertical growth. The soil around them was augmented this past spring with a large crumbling western red cedar log I hauled out of the local forest. That log brought with it all manner of micro-flora and fauna which has helped seed the garden and made life pretty exciting for the increasing number of native birds that use the garden - up to 23 species last count!)

This past week five starter plants of the Pachysandra terminalis (sometimes called Japanese spurge - not my favorite name) were planted in and around the rock work bordering the pebble path (photo above - what it looks like established in the Portland Japanese Garden - and below - my humble beginnings). A few more medium sized stones are yet to be places in this area, but already it "feels" right.

One of the happiest successes has been the way the Equisetum (native horsetail) has adopted to its new setting (photo below). My friend and expert gardener/plant guru cautioned me on transplanting Equisetum. So with great caution I did - prepping the subsurface with weed mat and perforated plastic, and course sand mixed into the poor dirt to enable a moderate degree of standing wetness to simulate a tanic wetland. The future for this area is to take the spill over water from the pond and what water floods down the dry creek bed during rainy spring and fall weather. BTW - this is the native Equisetum that does not invade the world.

One last look (below) at the pebble path and the initial plantings along its edge - still much work to do here, but also want to let the "weediness" take its rightful place naturally.

Weedy Wonder in My Absence

I have always had a passion for ferns, and mosses, and that odd collection of plant-like green things that live in the in between world, things like liverwort, clubmosses, and horsetail. My loving fondness for them is a childhood thing. They were woodland friends, the bed where I would lay, away from the "other" world, and stare into the treetops, the woodland world a living omnimax of life.

The appeal was in their evergreen-ness. Regardless the season they always remind me life was there. Some ferns would fade, impress there fine shape on beds of Polytrichum, but the whole house was moist, the scent of rich humus, fertile.

When I learned their names they were even more enchanting. Rarely such things as stodgy Douglas-this, or obvious color name like white or red something. All the contrary. They were imaginary things - ferns of Deer or Maidenhair, Lace, Lady and Licorice; mosses of Rope and Beak and Broom. So when it came to My garden, this world of green on loan to me for my few years, I knew I needed shade, and wet, and and the scent of decay. There could be no other than a sasso, "weed garden", as Motomi Oguchi calls it, and within it a yarimizu, a small pond and side wetland.

The garden has been happily evolving in its weedy wonder in my absence; these many weeks away on the Gulf Coast. Ferns and mosses and horsetails have erupted. While I have been tracking oil on beaches the sasso has been washed in gentle rain, and mild days, the greens have taken over under an umbrella of cumulus. In every seam and surface a bright flush of fern and mat of moss has begun. Without a a single spade being turned, the garden has begun gifting.

Thank you Jenn for watching over it with great kindness.

Last Light in the Japanese Garden

Last Light,

Fading through black pine,

Falls on bamboo.

Back home in Portland and the Fall has drifted over the Northwest while I was away - the colors have not shifted, but the season has. Light is low, and warm, and gentle. There is no rush to it's traverse.