Happy Monday GPODers!

We’ve seen several of the incredible Japanese-style gardens Bas Suharto has created in Canada (Building a Japanese-Inspired Garden, A Japanese-Style Courtyard Garden, and Building a Garden With Bas), and today we get to see another serene design. As an added bonus, he’s included the different mock-ups he created through the design process.

I want to share the back garden of my friend, Stefan. Recently he sent me photos, he added a rock in front of a ‘Beni-kaze’ hakone (Hakonechloa macra ‘Beni-kaze’, Zones 5–9). Also another photo where he added a taller rock on the middle of the “island”.

The beginning of his garden. I visited Stefan in Mont-Bleu, Quebec before the COVID-19 pandemic. We discussed his back garden, which had an existing lawn, plants and trees. Here is the photo of his back yard before winter in December 2020.

Stefan wanted less lawn and more organized or grouped plants to have easier maintenance. I proposed the preliminary design with a sketch. There are some existing trees like burgundy smoke trees and fruit trees. We discussed the preliminary design with this sketch and he liked the idea.

I finalized the sketch into a 3D drawing for showing the ideal look. Stefan liked very much the idea of a Japanese garden with a “peninsula” and an “island,” and dry lake look called karesansui. (For more information on the history of Japanese dry gardens, check out this awesome article from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

Last summer I visited Stefan’s garden to review; pruning or fixing certain plants, repositioning the rocks. Early autumn 2024 I visited his garden again, below are the photos.

Thank you for sharing another lush and inspired design, Bas! I’m always envious of your friends and neighbors that get to utilize your incredible eye.

Have a garden you’d like to share?

Have photos to share? We’d love to see your garden, a particular collection of plants you love, or a wonderful garden you had the chance to visit!

To submit, send 5-10 photos to gpod@taunton.com along with some information about the plants in the pictures and where you took the photos. We’d love to hear where you are located, how long you’ve been gardening, successes you are proud of, failures you learned from, hopes for the future, favorite plants, or funny stories from your garden.

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