Here is a garden that can fool you with its simplicity. It calls for fewer plants, more minutely perfect props, figurines, stones, and moss. It may be built around a pool with a Japanese bridge. Outwardly, it looks so easy and simple, but it isn’t. Just get one feature out of proportion and you will be unhappy. Remember, the Oriental artist is a person of great perfection, one with thousands of years of artistry behind him. Before attempting an Oriental garden, better get some good photographs or drawings. It will help you achieve a good picture and you will have a lasting satisfaction. Good luck.
Tropical Garden
This one should be lush with tropical creepers and climbing tropical trees, as pictured in the color section of this book. The container is a bowl from an overhead light fixture—the sort that used to hang above the dining-room table. (It cost ten cents in a junk shop.) The back is a masonry wall, made of pebbles and Sakrete, as is the irregular pool. Paint your pool blue-green. Since your plants will very likely require acid soil, separate the construction material from the soil by strong plastic.
Desert Garden
Little but cacti and kindred succulents can grow here, and sparsely at that. Sedum multiceps, little Joshua tree, has a picturesque tree-like character. Use a suitable soil mixture completely covered with a layer of desert sand, or very fine gravel. Build a dune perhaps. Or make an oasis with a few palms around a pool—an irregularly shaped pool like one might see in a mirage. How about a few strands of grass—maybe not quite in tune with the setting but it might be considered as bamboo. A little faking is permissible.
Rock Garden
This usually calls for building up a rocky slope supported by hardware cloth in the rear and lined with moss to keep the soil from falling through. Follow good rock-gardening rules—rocks of the same kind but of varying shapes, with their layers, or strata, running horizontal. At the base of the slope you might contrive a small pool overflowing into a plastic-limed stream. Make a rustic gate and bridges with evergreen twigs wired and glued together.
Woodland Garden
Naturalistic arrangements of woodsy plants, rocks, moss, fallen logs. Seedling evergreens are fine. Artificial props are out.
Meadow Garden