My Japanese Garden Evokes Joy Even in Gloomy Weather!

[Music] well hello again friends on YouTu YouTube lovers of Japanese style Gardens and gardening enthusiasts this is Nathan Lawrence again uh good news Tree Service in Wilsonville Oregon coming to you on a wet and blustery stormy winter day in the month of December 2023 and I want to give you a quick tour of my Japanese garden here in the middle of the winter actually winter hasn’t started yet it will in a few days but it seems like it because as you can see it’s raining and it is very blustery and I want to show you that a Japanese garden looks good even in the winter time even when the rain is coming down and and the sky is gray it can still bring you a lot of joy as it does to me in my garden and so a Japanese garden is not just a fair weather friend it brings me joy all year long if I keep up with it maintain it um you know keep the leaves and the weeds picked up and the plants pruned and and all the Myriad things that are necessary to keep a Japanese garden looking good this Garden uh will bring you Joy every month of the year whether it’s ice snow wind rain summer heat it’s always smiling and can bring the recipient the the the curator of the garden much joy and pleasure and those of you who are garden enthusiasts know exactly what I’m talking about so I’m going to give you a tour of the garden and show you a few things that I’ve done to improve it since we last made a video and also encourage you to enjoy your Japanese garden 247 365 days a year all right let’s take a tour but before we start this quick tour I want to say something as an encouragement to you people that think to all the people out there think that oh I can’t do a Japanese garden I can’t you know I don’t have the money I don’t have the resource I don’t have the knowhow that’s not necessarily true first of all for those of you that have watched my previous videos you see that I don’t live in a really fancy house I live in the middle of a normal middle American neighborhood don’t have a large yard my house is an older house it was built in 1920 it’s definitely not Japanese style it’s kind of a a cottage um craftsman style from the early early 20th century but I have um been working on my garden for many years I have not had a lot of money to spend uh we raised four children in this home and uh so we’re always on a tight budget we’re a small family business and so you know I’m I I have not had a lot of resources what I have done is I’ve over the years I’ve collected rocks and plants and and different things I like little by little building it up little by little to the point where it is now this did not happen overnight in a day and anybody can do that anybody can little by little start in a corner of their Garden or or little area of their garden and expand and build and so I want to encourage you you don’t have to be uh gardening a Fado a you know a maestro in the garden yeah you know study study the Japanese gardening style study things that you like and begin to little by little experiment and if you don’t like it change it add subtract and I’ve been doing this for years and this is where we where we have come up to this point and I’m constantly um changing upgrading taking plants out putting new plants in and and getting ideas and constantly uh morphing and shaping it uh and uh once I get something to way I like it I leave it that way and then I go to another area that may isn’t quite so uh you know up to par and I and I bring that up and little by little the garden uh little by little comes into fruition and end up hopefully with with a masterpiece at least that you’re happy with I certainly am happy with my garden so as you can see it’s a really wet and rainy day there’re standing water and as I walk through the front gate of my of my house here uh through the the Tor E Gate um one of the recent additions I’ve done is I’ve I purchased Pur this flagstone that came from the state of Montana a real thick kind of slate and I’ve uh replaced all the small stones that led up to my front uh walk my front walk up to my front door much nicer look than what I had before and as you can see there’s standing water water’s draining uh here into my yard uh I live on a colda sack and the water unfortunately all drains into my yard and uh you know it is what it is what are you going to do about that U not going to get the city to help you that’s for sure so here’s a quick view of my uh uh front yard and again we’ve been through here before but I want to show you that even in the winter time there’s still uh leaves I haven’t got all the leaves picked up yet and uh this is one side of my house and uh so I’m you know still have projects I’m doing and there’s still leaves are blowing in from the neighbors and and so forth but I’ll tell you the plants love this cool weather I mean they’re the Mosses down here are doing really well and and all the plants love this this cool weather they’re just soaking it up after especially after a a long hot dry summer kind of pan around the front yard here real fast there goes the mailman you can see I don’t have a really large yard uh anybody can do that you don’t need a large yard to have a Japanese garden and the leaves are off the trees I’ve come back and done a little pruning on some of these uh in this case this is a a type of Japanese map and I’ve done some pring on that so I can see the architecture of it I’m getting that the way I want it I’ve got a dogwood in a pot and I got a little Memorial my mom died a couple almost three years ago so I’ve got her uh little grave marker there she’s not buried there but um and that’s what they had before we got the tombstone on the grave so anyway and then uh going to go through the gate there’s my grill one of my grills so since we left last um made a video I put I’ve put PE gravel I used to have square gravel in here I got rid of the square gravel it like to track into the um house and get in the shoes the tread of our boots and shoes and gets into the house so I replace it with pea gravel I’ve noticed that in the Japanese Garden in Portland uh they have pea gravel probably because they don’t want to tracked all over the place and the PE gravel is hard to walk on but if you have stepping ston then you can walk on the stepping stones and the PE gravel looks really nice because as you can see here it’s all different colors which is really adds a nice look to the Japanese garden I didn’t like the fact that you just walk on the side of my yard into my garden and boom now you saw the garden I wanted some some obstacles to have to look through and I wanted something that where you had to kind of walk around and kind of come into the garden gradually so I planted these uh there a couple deodara Cedars and I made a whole this bed I brought it out into the garden as kind of like a a peninsula if you will it juts out and I put these uh these trees in here and this is this is all new last several months and I also planted moss in here I wanted now you can see leaves i’ I’ve actually got netting down here because the birds get in and dig it up and I want the Moss to take root before the um Birds dig it up cuz they’re constantly digging it up looking for food and whatnot and so I’ve got a moss garden I plant a lot of moss in here you know Japanese garden needs Moss lots of moss so I’ve got netting over the top of this to keep the birds out and so here is the Garden in the wintertime again it’s uh early part of December and uh I’ve got a big Stone here you step on it kind of like invites you to come out here and stand on it like I’m doing now and then look up and view the garden and again I just I don’t have a Japanese style house it’s just a regular house I’ve got a out building in the back this is not my house this is actually my office for my business and my man cave if you will and then I’ve got I’ve got a Gamel type out building a shed in the back and I’ve just Incorporated my Japan’s Garden around around this and uh here it is so I’ve uh got more PE gravel and stone stepping stones that go to the back I’ve added these stepping stones in recently and there’s my little bonai display of bonai a few little bonai uh uh shrubs and when the weather gets really cold I will have to put them in uh I will actually um put them in big pots and put mulch around them to protect the roots so the roots don’t freeze in the cold weather here’s my water feature which is right underneath my bedroom window so I can hear the water at night and here we go around to the back side of the house and I’ve done some improvements here too since we made it our last video and got a pot there with a little Japanese Maple in it all kind of bonesy prune and a little Sanctuary back here then coming back into the yard we’re going to the back of the yard and uh another water feature you’ve all seen this before if you watch my previous videos but I wanted you to see what it looks like in the winter time and here’s the beautiful coral bark maple all the leaves are off and now the um the the the um chlorophylls are gone out of the green colored bark and what’s left is the bright red cartenoids the red the red colors in the bark and that’s what I like about the coral bark this is a sangu kako coral bark maple and you have this beautiful uh red um color hence the name coral bark that stands out very nicely against the the uh the green foliage of the other shrubs behind it the arbor Vite and and uh and against the the gray very gray sky it’s a nice kind of a splash of color and then as I move to the very back of the yard here here is the the end of the Garden or toward the end of the garden garden and um this is a recent I had some pots in here before I got rid of the pots I didn’t like the look of that I planted some variated uous and I just recently planted this lace leaf maple somebody gave that a customer of mine gave it to me said get it out of my yard I don’t want it anymore and I said I’ll take it so there it is and it comes up and kind of Graces this bird feeder so now the squirrels have something to climb up on and get into the bird feeder so anyway there is uh here’s the back 40 of my Japanese garden and uh there’s the end of it it kind of meanders back and I have stuff stored back there hidden away so here pan around and here is it from this angle so as you can see I’ve got some water hoses and faucets I don’t like that look I’ve got to find find some way to obscure that so you’re not looking at an ugly old red hose but we need hoses to keep not this time of the year but in the summer time to keep everything irrigated so I’m working on a plan how to obscure that hose in the meantime here’s my my bell and we got to ring this just because we got to enjoy the beautiful sound of the Bell yes you need a bell in your garden and a big piece of bamboo to hold it up there and I’ve been blessed recently got some Windchimes and all nothing like hearing that the wind blowing and hearing these lovely Chimes which are made in America they are uh uh Corinthian Chimes bells made in uh Wind River somewhere back uh in New England and so I’m pretty excited about that they’re very very very lovely when the wind blows you can just hear them gently singing and then here’s a wood box I made now what why am I excited about this wood box this is actually a wood box to hold firewood but this is a very Japanese thing to do as well and let me uh get up in here on my deck these were old these are old Cedar deck boards this deck I replaced the wood of this deck this year and this these were the old cedar boards if you look on the back side they’re still painted gray and I had all these boards left over and I did not want to throw them away because well they’re very expensive cedar boards so what I did is I flipped them over turned them upside down so you got the the ridges on the back the used to be the underside and I made a very sturdy wood box for my firewood and so um and that’s that’s a kind of a Japanese thing to do is to take old CA castoff materials and add that into the Japanese garden to give your garden a sense of age and maturity a certain uh historical um Antiquity patina if you will and certainly this wood box it may not be very special to some people but it is to me because it has the look of age and I like that in a Japanese garden it it’s uh it just gives it a certain stability and maturity and wisdom uh a look and that’s important from what what I have studied that’s really important for the Japanese is is history and the sense of connectedness to the past and so that’s why I’m kind of excited about this wood box it actually kind of looks like a treasure chest that you might have found buried under the sand except it instead of being filled with treasure it’s filled with firewood which on a cold day there’s nothing like a warm fire in your U living room to um warm things up that is a treasure in its own right so one more look at the Garden from my back deck and um I hope you enjoyed this take care blessings to you [Music] all