More and more people are enjoying their time at home and in the garden, especially during Covid-19. Restaurants and stores were closed, people are working from home and it is better to welcome your visitors outside instead of inside the house. To create a meditative space outside your home, Zen gardens are getting more popular. To start with a Zen garden, we do recommend you to be someone who likes to do some maintenance in the garden.
Even though a Zen garden looks simple, it costs a lot of time and effort to create and maintain it.
When is a garden Zen?
Zen garden original idea comes from the Buddhist monks. They are also called the miniature landscapes because it has many aspects of nature. By combining white gravel with plants, it represents the mountains, islands, and waves. Therefore, Zen gardens can be characterized in several ways:
- Quite abstract and minimalistic, because of the artistic quality
- Dry landscapes, because of raked gravel to represent water
- Japanese rock gardens, because of the high usage of rocks
- Walled garden, because this is helpful to meditation
How to create a Zen garden?
First, select an area in the garden and prepare a rectangle space. To choose where space should be located, consider the plants you are going to choose. You can choose plants that need sun, but you can also choose plants that like shadow. Therefore, decide beforehand your plants before choosing the space you are going to use.
Check for uneven spots
Second, clear anything sticking out of the ground and remove the top layer of the soil with a shovel. You then check and clear the uneven spots by using a garden rake. Once finished, tamp down the soil and run the edges with stones along the fence. A recommendation is to use Cobblestone because it makes use of white gravel.
Preferred plants to select
Third, start digging holes for the plants and rocks that are representing a mountain and island. Use your imagination of how nature should look like to arrange this. An important tip is to avoid symmetrical patterns because they will look unreal instead. For the plants, we recommend you to buy plants online, so you can easily select the best plants for a Zen Garden. When you buy the plants online, for Zen garden, we recommend thyme, moss, grass, deutzia, evergreen, ferns, corkscrew rush, bamboo, horsetail, and Japanese maple. However, there are also a lot of other available choices.
Use the holes for plant installment
Last but not least, install the plants and rocks in the holes. Taller rocks should be buried in the ground, whereas the smaller rocks should be placed as the tip-of-a-mountain to make it look more natural. Once done, use a landscape fabric where you add soil on top of it. This can help to accommodate the rocks and plants. Finish off with a little white gravel by distributing it.
Article courtesy: Haruki Ogawa
