Torii gate addition and update of our Japanese Garden 2025

Hello designers,
Today’s video has been long coming! It is the very first walk through of our Japanese garden in its second year. This summer has been another very busy one with lots of planting and some new construction. As I say in the introduction, this project is by no means complete. It is very much a work in progress with plans changing all the time. I hope you enjoy seeing all the changes!

Welcome back everyone to Designing with Mark. It’s been a whole year. It’s hard to believe really um when I stood here a year ago and introduced the idea of having an authentic or as authentic as I can get um Japanese garden for our backyard. It’s um been a long time coming and it’s been in the planning phase in my head for several years and last year we got started on it. Now last year uh the focus was strictly on digging the koi pond and using the dirt from that dig to create the BMS for the garden. And that took the entire summer. And uh this summer we’ve had a little different approach. We’ve done a lot of planting. We’ve added koi to the koi pond which will be at the end of this video. And some things have changed. Even my plans have changed. We’re going to walk through and have our very first walk through. And I want to preface this by saying this is a work in progress. So it’s not a finished thing. It wasn’t something that was a project you can get done in one summer. It wasn’t going to happen. It’s going to be several years. And I want it to be several years. So, let’s get started. [Applause] Here we are. And we’re going to start here. And we’re going to do a sweep of the entire garden to start with. At first, I was going to because I know what I like on YouTube videos when I watch them. I’m very different than most people. Most people are ready to click on to the next video if it extends more than a minute and a half. I like when the plants are explained and identified. Not going to do that right now, but what I can do is promise that if I hear from viewers that they would like that, I can always do that afterwards. Today is just a sweep to see how things have developed over the course of about a year and a half now. So, we’re going to start in the corner. So, we’re going to adjust our focus here. Um, if there’s a plant that I can just name right off the top of my head, I will. Um, the Japanese maples, I’ll never remember their names. I’ll have to have Q cards for that. But, we’re going to start in the corner. What I decided to do for the planting is intersperse conifers with Japanese maples. Basically, that’s the whole that’s all of the planting in the entire um Japanese garden. So, we have the umbrella pine and we have a blue spruce, Japanese maple, Shiraz. I believe we did put in a pagota. Um they weigh a ton. They’re very heavy. um and very expensive. So, we’ve have like two of them in the garden right now. This is a larger one here. Looks great in the garden. If you follow me down here, we have a flamethrower eastern red bud that last summer, its first summer in the garden, I thought we had lost it because it dropped every single leaf and the leaves blew everywhere in midsummer. It just got uh scorched. This year it’s going crazy. I mean crazy to the point where the branches are laying on the ground and crawling on the ground. So, we’re going to definitely have some pruning to do. Um probably I think maybe next spring. I not a big fall pruner, but we’ll we’ll make that decision um later on. Um okay, back to the garden. Looking down, um, we have, uh, two really dwarf, um, conifers. One is a golden U. I love it. Um, stone and then an ice breaker. Um, last year we, one of our ice breakers. We didn’t realize at the time. We purchased a full size one, which um, didn’t make it through the winter. This one’s um, really dwarf version. Japanese maple, autumn moon, I think. I’m not positive. Um, this one is a a form of a cryptoarriia, I believe. And tamukiyama, Japanese maple, one of the weeping ones, and it weeps over where where our goal is is that these can get really kind of big. So eventually maybe the whole top of the overflow for the pond filter will be covered. This black uh this black thing will be covered over. We have an a couple of the one on either side of the waterfall. And I want to talk about one thing before we move over to the other side. And that’s a dilemma that we’re having this year is what are we going to put down on the ground? And at first my mind was we were going to mulch. Uh it turns out Japanese gardens are not mulch. And I’m trying to be as authentic as I can. So ideally it would be great if Andy if you could follow me. Um, I know it’s kind of hard to see, but we’re gradually getting moss growing in the garden. That’s my ideal. And I’ve had a neighbor who is giving us some moss from his yard. Um, it’s slow growing. Um, it’s nobody sells moss as far as I know. But that would be my ideal because we do have, you’re going to see it on the other side, some um Japanese grass, but if you have too much of that around, it’s just going to encourage rodents. So, we don’t and we we’ve had that issue before. So, we’re not going in that direction. Now, I’m going to stop here and we’ll readjust and we’re going to look at our Japanese holl. Okay. Now, we’ve turned ourselves back around. We’re facing the gate now. And I want to just quickly show you um these Japanese holl, which was almost an afterthought um when I first designed the garden, but it’s they’re they right in front of our porch door, which there’s nothing wrong with the porch door. Um but there’s a mini split um behind these right now. and our VGO hose holder that aren’t the prettiest things. And also the whole idea with a Japanese garden is this idea of mystery around the corner and that you come upon something that it’s unexpected. So I kind of want these. There’s eight of them. And believe it or not, I think they were down to here last summer and really skinny. And now they’re getting fatter and they’re getting almost well to here on me. I decided I was going to do like a chop. I think I’m going to wait till next year and then let’s see how cuz some of them are, as you can see, are growing quite roundish. I’m hoping to fill in the spaces between each of them and that this will become a hedge that’s about as tall as me. 6 feet tall hopefully. And there’s eight of them and they go all the way down to here. Right now we do we take cutthroughs to get to the porch door. Uh I don’t know. I might decide to put some kind of an entrance here or not. To me it’s fine without doing that. But technically you’re supposed to go follow the path all the way around and come through here. to get to the stairs. And this is an easy access to the gate which ex uh exits to the front garden. So, I’ll cut through and we’ll move on. Now, you can see me up on our very first circular burm right in front of uh there’s two circular berms right directly um adjacent to the koi pond. the the elevation is almost I would say from down from the gravel up to the peak it’s probably close to 20 in at least and again it’s just I didn’t want it to look too uh affected too planned out but um it is what it is at this point we have made some changes I pulled some things out that didn’t look great next to each other or weren’t filling the space properly Um, but this one, as a matter of fact, is a recent addition. This, um, Thunderhead black pine, which is my probably my most favorite conifer. And it’s and at least of the uh, Japanese conifers. And what I’m planning on doing on this one is to prune it with clouds. if you’ve seen those um done before. This year, I think I’m just going to let it grow out, let it get established. We had originally one of those drooping or uh columner u spruce that would go up to a certain height and then spill over. But it got at the base. It wasn’t girdled, but it did get eaten by the rabbit. Alrighty. Now, just talked about a thunderhead pine, black Japanese black pine, also a Japanese black pine. The dwarf will not probably get much bigger than this and but a totally different um shape to it. Um dwarf spruce, golden spruce, firefly, I believe might be the name. Uh another Japanese maple. I’m going to have Andy come around on this side over here. Another Japanese maple called Shaina. Really pretty color. We have a dwarf conifer tom thumb, I believe, is the name. I almost looks like a globe aravite, but a tiny one. Here’s another um dwarf pine. This is a white pine. Really soft needles. Got it. Has a great shape to it. Another Japanese maple. I’m not sure the name. I think it’s like orange dream, I believe. Something like that. And that one that looks just like fingers sticking up as another crypto area. That completes this first burm. And we’re now going to walk over to the pond and the sitting area. Right now, you’re looking at our new sitting area in the Japanese garden. This was something that was completely unplanned. I’ll have a seat. Thank you very much. Right now I’m framed by two um rather large ‘s or might be a cedar um trees um that provide wonderful shade uh in the hot summer sun and allows me to have a great view of our koi pond and it’s enough for seating for two. So it’s basically planted with uh a hydrangeanger, hostas, uh steel bees, aelas, and some monkey grass behind right directly behind uh me. It looks a little bit planned. I wanted it to look a little bit more natural. So that may change as we speak. Um, but for now, uh, it it’s a wonderful place to sit and and view the garden from a variety of perspectives, but ideally the pond. So, we’re going to turn this around because I want to talk about the area that was all rock and rubble last year this time. So, here I am standing right on the edge of our beautiful koi pond. And I must say it is really nice. People that neighbors that have gone by have commented at on it and um relatives have come over to see it. It truly is um quite a beautiful thing to watch. And now we have 11 or 12 um rather large they’ve grown Japanese koi that are absolutely beautiful. Got some changes coming though maybe for next year. Um before I talk about that, I just want to point out another Japanese maple veritis similar to the tamukiyama that will hopefully spill over. This gets quite large as well and will spill right over the edge of the pond to soften some of the hard edges. Uh this one is another Shiraz that’s we started the very first one that we started back over at the gate. We love the color so much. It’s this beautiful Andy is a little bit far away, but we’ll do close-ups at another time. But it’s absolut It’s pink. It’s about as pink as you can get for a a tree. Our other Japanese pagota, the little one here. And this area here last year was rubble heaven. It was just filled with stone and weeds and so forth. I’ve managed to kind of keep it cleared out. There’s a few stones left over in case we need them. This was going to be the area, and it still might be for a Japanese a true miniature Japanese tea house. Uh, I’m not sure. I’m getting I’m I’m rethinking that idea because the more that we’ve got into the koi, the more we’ve enjoyed that. And if you ask anyone who has started out with a koi pond, they always want it a little bit bigger. So, what might happen? It’s my idea is to enlarge this pond so that it goes up and around like a kind of like a double kidney shape. So it’s going to be like like that. This area will stay and so forth. But um and which in s in one other way will change another plan which is uh the original idea that I had for the Japanese bridge. It was going to go right here right across these stones in the path. I don’t know. I’m thinking now maybe it might be better if there’s water here that there’s a bridge that actually crosses over water. So may and actually it might be a smaller bridge rather than this one being about 12 ft long. This might be more like eight. So that’s in the planning. Um because these koi from Japan are significantly larger. So and our pond current pond is about 181,900 gallons I believe. Something to that effect. Okay. Now I’m going to turn around and we’re going to hit the last circular burm and just kind of give you an idea of the other end of which has now become the entrance to the actual entrance to the Japanese garden. So, how do you like it? This is the big surprise, a very unexpected surprise. Um, I was hoping uh that it would we were going to be able to put up the Tory gate this summer, but with all the planting and all the purchasing of the plants that we had to do prior to this, uh, we didn’t think it was going to happen. But thanks to my sister and her help a little bit, it we were able to get this thing up and we sent away for it in California. It came on a huge uh flatbed wood and the as a kit, a very heavy kit, nearly 300 lb. Um, so I almost almost was going to film me putting it up, but that would have been a comedy of errors. Uh, because I had to do lift the entire thing myself, believe it or not. And this was a heavy thing. And it is now buried into the ground about 20 in. But in the midst of getting this all up and I was literally like this holding it, the skies broke open and torrential rain for the next hour. And I literally stood like this for an hour until the rain stopped and the holes that the posts were in 20 in deep filled up with rain in about a minute and a half. Uh but they’re here. It’s standing. It’s solid and it looks fantastic, I think. So, this is the new entrance to the uh Japanese garden. And the color vermilion that is another story unto itself just to get this color paint color. We we managed to get it at Home Depot, believe it or not. Uh matt matched as close to vermillion as possible. So this is uh the entrance and as you can see we have stepping stones and gravel. So last year I think I was able to get most of the gravel in and a few of the st the step few of the stepping stones. And Andy you can stay right where you are. Uh, we got about as far I don’t know how far you can get me down to this circular burm down here. So that’s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 nine about eight or nine stepping stones. And these are an important part to a Japanese garden because it forces you to kind of walk contemplatively slowly watching your steps so that you don’t trip either. And if you look around me, in about in another minute, we’re going to turn the camera around and show you what the big change was this summer because this was a whole area of about 20 roodendrrons that had been planted over the 15 years, last 15 years or so, that are all gone and have been replaced with conifers and Japanese maples. Well, here I am up on the hill. This is the part of the yard that kind of goes up on an incline. Quite an incline. So, from the very top up over here down to the bottom is probably an elevation maybe of six feet. And right along the front here, all the way down all the way down actually to even even with the um koi pond were all um roodendrrons kind of that standard uh big box store roodendrrons, the purple ones that aren’t the prettiest of all. And mo many of them got killed over the last winter. So, we decided to take them all out and replace them with a mix again, a mix of conifer and Japanese maple. So, we have a Japanese maple, a larger one. This is they’re still dwarf, but and we’re going to keep them small if we can. Um, and conifers. This is another one of the You’re going to see this variety um on the middle burm that we haven’t gone over yet. Um, a variety of conifers. This is a red Japanese red uh pine which I love. I love the shape of it. Oh, I want to point this out too. I don’t know if Andy can get a shot of it, but this I don’t want to bend over. I’ll fall. This grass-like uh plant is called black mondo grass, which is um an authentic grass that you can use in Japanese gardens. Um hard to find. really really difficult to find. Uh but the hardest part of this whole part process up here is dealing with LA the about four summers ago we took down a whole row of uh maples that were taller than our house and which opened up all this light. We wouldn’t have been able to plant any of the conifers without those down. But the roots are still all through this. So I have been spending the entire summer with my reciprocating saw with a pruning blade cutting roots that are long, you know, 8 ft long and are about this wide or thick. Um just to get uh allow for some room for these new roots to to really grow. So, some really interesting and favorite um Japanese maples here. I don’t want to get into too much. This is a ryusin one that droops right over. Um it gets to a certain height and then it just droops right down. It was really unusual. Um this one’s going crazy with these chartreuse leaves. a lot. We found that a lot of the um Japanese maple for some reason about in August, end of August, they all started to do this. They all started to kind of sprout out. Um and and this gives you an idea of some of the color, but the actual fall color has not come out yet. Okay, I’m going to stop here so we can turn around the camera and catch the last area right by the back step. Okay, we we’re at a very difficult area here to plant. I’ve always all the years that I’ve been here, this is right by our back porch, and it’s kind of a odd shaped little garden. And I’ve usually uh relegated it to impatience for the summer and then just snow for the winter. But we decided to put this filigree um Japanese maple which fit the entire almost the entire space the span of it and uh it stays really low and um and really feathery very very pretty and we surrounded that that particular one with cars grass cars is how I believe is how you pronounce it. a v variegated variety. Three different types. This one here where my foot is, that’s different than this one here and those four over there, the white frost. All righty. I’m going to enter our new Japanese garden and then take you down towards the last BM. Well, before I head down our new path, uh I want to just point out these two pieces of granite. Um, I they originally over to the in front of the path to the garage. These came out of the backyard. I dug them out of the our own backyard about 20 years ago. And they’re big hunks. I don’t know what they were for, but I thought they were nice little centuries before you actually enter the gravel path. So, I’m going to head down here. Oh, I just want to point out this Japanese maple is really unusual because it’s got has that sort of very bonsai like stem. It’s got almost like an S twist to it. I don’t know the name of it. Uh it’s got a very unusual name to it and rather rather rare I think as well. Okay, this BM that you’re looking at right now is the one BM in the entire garden that’s almost completely in shade. And the central um maple, Japanese maple um full moon uh requires that deep shade or otherwise it just crisps right up which which it was new to the garden last year and that’s what we’re finding out a lot about these Japanese maples are until they get used to the environment any kind of sun seems to kind of crisp them a little bit. And we were able to put hostas in this garden without going crisp. So we have three different hostas. And this was the only fern. I don’t know if Andy can get it. Um with these sort of brown fronds that survived our winter this past year. We planted about three of them. Only one survived. And even the painted ferns over there, I’ll go over on the other side. Um, have had a hard time this summer. They’re they’re even in the shade. They’re kind of crisp a little bit on some of the fronds. Here’s some aonlora grass. That Japanese aonora grass. We put two at the base of the um garden bench. M they they’ve not done as well as this one’s done the best and it’s about to I guess they call this the flower part and this particular Japanese maple likes about half and half of shade and and a little bit of sun which takes us to our last berm and last but not least is this central berm which when you’re and maybe if I can convince Andy to take one final shot from the farthest point right by the garage and right through the Tory gate and be able to see this is quite a shot. Uh we have a spreading spruce I believe. Uh a blue spruce in the middle. Uh very unusual Japanese maple. I it’s it the leaves are kind of layered upon each other. Uh I can’t the name of it eluding me at the moment. Another Japanese maple here. I don’t think you’re going to be able to see. There’s a small kryptonia on the other side. Another Japanese maple. and another white pine over there called penguin. Um which is right in front of the pond. So until next time, I don’t know when it’ll be. Um we’re at this point we’re just maintaining at this time of the year. We’re about to go into fall. So it’s about thinking about pruning possibly um and then getting these ready for winter because we’re a little bit concerned about rabbits and the damage that they’ve done over the winter. And I’ll say goodbye for now.