How to Design a Japanese Garden: part 2

Part 1- teaches you the various components of Japanese Gardens.
Part 2- teaches you how to design Japanese Gardens using these components.

Transcript
"Lets have a go at Designing Japanese Gardens, using the elements we learned in Part 1.

Here we have an aerial view of the backyard. The first thing we must do is site analysis to learn about the site so we can design professionally. If you haven't seen my Site analysis tutorial I strongly recommend watching it to aid your designs.

Site Analysis

From site analysis we have identified a large steep hill to the side of the site, a few different access points, a cool moist climate and some leftover vegetation, which we will remove because they are not traditional Japanese plants and would look out of place.

Functionality

The first thing we should do when designing gardens is to consider the functionality of the site. A garden is only successful if it gets used and people are only going to use it if it functions properly. This means we have to decide on the human circulation throughout the site and arrange viewpoints, which we know are important to Japanese gardens. True to Japanese gardens, I'm including winding paths that create a sense of exploration and mystery in the site. These paths interconnect and also lead to our important access points. The paths lead up the steep hill and logic tells us that this would be a good spot for a view point so I'm going to situate it here. I'm going to draw my lines of vision from this point to other parts of the site and do the same for a different viewpoint. Now we have our lines of vision and circulation mapped out we can design the site around it. This means: don't plant shrubs on a path and don't plant screening trees in a line of vision. Remember your functionality.

Now we have our functionality organised, its time to put things into the garden. To get the natural feel that Japanese gardens aspire to we shall design in this Order:

-Nature
-Hardscapes
-Vegetation
-Extras"
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