A Colorado Garden: A Serene Asian-Inspired Garden

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Japanese shoji screens traditionally are made from translucent rice paper, but the owners chose a durable, light-penetrating fabric that will prevail in harsh weather. It allows filtered light without sacrificing privacy. The floor is salvaged pine planks from a park ranger’s mountain cabin, and a round window brings in the garden even when the doors are closed. Photo By Povy Kendal Atchison

Ten years ago, a Boulder, Colorado, couple bought a house on a patch of grass with some overgrown shrubs, sliced by an irrigation ditch. Where many people might have seen desolation, these intrepid gardeners saw the opportunity to create a private world of solitude and renewal. In the process, they discovered that designing and planting is as soothing as enjoying the completed garden.

The contemplative garden they’ve created gently nods to Asian style while embracing European impressionism. It borrows from 19th-century impressionist painter Claude Monet, as well as from the Japanese love of plant textures, weeping trees and artfully placed rocks. It includes water, rocks, expanses of greenery and winding paths, but not the formal Japanese plantings that require so much upkeep.

Monet’s famous garden in Giverny, France, includes a Japanese bridge over a water lily pond. In this Colorado garden, a pale-aqua bridge arches over an irrigation ditch that’s been funneling water to farmers for 100 years. Just as the lily pad pond became the Monet garden’s major draw, the ditch has been transformed—lined with sandstone rocks alongside a bed of river rocks. Gold, yellow and orange daylilies drape the bank, blooming in midsummer when the Siberian and Japanese irises offer only seed pods. Ornamental grasses bend and sway to the breeze stirred up by the water’s flow. The ditch is an enticement; visitors brace against the railing and peer into the water, watching blossoms float downstream.

Every corner of this garden was designed with careful thought, not lavish funds. A decade of hard work and trial-and-error provided an education.

Piecing together elegance

Every corner of this garden was designed with careful thought, not lavish funds. A decade of hard work and trial-and-error provided an education. In hindsight, the homeowners believe their decision to tackle their garden in small pieces rather than taking on the entire half-acre saved them time, money and frustration.

“We didn’t have a grand master plan,” one of the homeowners admits. Instead, he started by clearing dead and dying trees. Then he parceled the property into smaller gardens: a ditch lined with water-loving plants and flagstones circles the edges of the gardens and is sprinkled with elfin thyme and other herbs for groundcover.

To imitate nature’s undulating, uneven landscape, he built mounds, or berms, from garden soil, adding interest to the flat piece of land. Berms also provide quick drainage for plants that might never take hold without humus and gravel. Sun-loving plants such as foxtail lilies and peonies are located on the sunny mounds. Shade-loving hostas line the flagstone walkways under giant locust trees.