This is a difficult question to answer without knowing the location of mature plantings. So...winging it...here are a few thoughts.

If you study books on Japanese gardening you will note that backless flat benches may be placed in viewing spots around a garden. Not what you want. Usually the seating areas in this type of garden are under cover in shed like structures known as 'waiting sheds' or 'tea houses'. Would a variation of this type of structure work?

Or, might it be possible to excavate a seating area about 3' deep, lined with purchased stone that has an irregular appearance? This would give you a raised garden look.

Pictures might help us to give you an idea or two.

Whoops! Sorry. Not clear.

I'm not trying to truly imitate an Asian garden but take elements of it and encorporate it into a different sort of space. Interest in Asian gardens was high in the 1950s among those at the edge of fashion, and so I want something that blends Asian with a modern formal sensibility, with the emphasis on the Asian to avoid symettry and rigidity. Purists will have a hear attack, but imagine mostly Japanese plantings with geometric elements. Rather than the pavilions that are so common in Asian garden desing--particularly Chinese--I want to use courtyards, negative space rather than positive. To create the "walls" of the courtyard, I'd like to start with raised beds, which, if I get the depth right, would help around the trees because the roots are very, very shallow, and I risk killing them in I make on-grade beds.

The trees are HUGE (60ft high), which is actually good because it means that I have partial shade and even sun in many parts of the yard. I love how they create a canopy far above, and I really, really don't want to hurt any of them but to use their placement as the foundation for the garden and fill in with smaller trees, bushes, and accents of perennials and annuals. I have no idea what kind the trees are. They are way too high for me to get a decent look at the leaves, and I'm not good enough to ID from bark.

I plan to create a yard-area in front of the house and to finish screening the house from the street (sounds odd, but works in the location--wouldn't recommend it in most situations) and put in a large entertaining area between the yard and the street, with an outdoor kitchen, a series of outdoor rooms, etc. The property is pie-shaped, with only 65' across the cul-de-sac but is 350' long at the back. There is a front stretch beyond the trees in full sun that I want to make into a mixed half-evergreen shrub border (with some flowering trees for a different form and seasonal interest, plus some perennials and annuals in the "gaps"). This I could raise to nearly 2', which would give the wall-cum-planting space feel that I love. The rest of the areas will have to be lower, but would it look silly to have 1' high walls (with 8" deep beds inside)? These would border the courtyard spaces, which would have various patterns of stone and greenery.

Here are some pics. Standing at the start of the trees looking at the house:

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Standing about halfway between where I was standing and the house looking toward the street, left side (mulched trees are ours):

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Right side:

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(That evergreen on the right is a good 25' tall, to give you some perspective.)

The pervious owners adored their lawn but had very little else other than some terribly concieved foundation plantings. (I love the azeleas...but not THERE!)

And, obviously, this isn't in NM. Sorry! *g*

I wouldn't put anythnig against the trunks of the trees. I'd have a ring of stone (hidden by plants) keeping any new topsoil back a good 8".

Ooh, Reyesuela, I think you're going to have fun with this. The current plantings are so inappropriate, as you said, for the architecture of this house. But you'll probably be able to keep and incorporate some into your new look, possibly moving others. But, like you, I can easily see Japanese-inspired plantings. I don't have any answers to your raised bed question but I do envision weeping trees, low growing garden juniper and even possibly a dry bed type thing with stones somewhere. That is a huge sweep of lawn though. Over time you can have fun transforming parts of it.

Patty

Raised beds can kill trees too. It seems like you may need help with all your plans anyway, so why not make one of your first calls to an arborist who can assist you maintaining the health of your trees while creating the effect you want.

I'd love to see where you are going with this project, lots of interesting influences in your head!

Good idea! I know they can kill trees if you smother the roots. And so can hacking through the roots to put in a bed! I'm hoping I can get the right depth so I do no root-hacking AND no smothering. Fortunately, my fondness for shrubs means that once I have everything planted, I won't be doing huge amounts of messing about in the bed and can leave the tree roots alone as they come through again.

We're going to add on to the front of the house--the left bay will come out about 30' more than it is now. I'm going to use that to take a wall straight across from there and up from the corner of the (currently) red section to create a courtyard. It won't have a gate--the doorway will be open to the yard. Inside, I want a courtyard garden.

A bluestone-set-in-gravel path will stretch from the driveway across the yard portion and to the courtyard. (Taking it from the street would look silly in this case.) There will be an open yard section there as large as most front yards. *g* Preferably, I'd love to do a no-mow yard in which I can plant some species tulips, crocuses, grape hyacinths, lilies of the valley, and the like in semi-artificial patterns among the grasses...not sure exactly how yet...could be kind of cool. That part of the yard would be ringed by a mixed shrub border to screen it from the neighbors and the front part of the yard, closer to the street, which will start at the first trees on either side.

The front section will be pure entertainment rooms, divided by walls of beds. I'm going to have a full-fledged outdoor kitchen, with 3-5 other very spacious rooms flowing one to the next. The sorts of spaces are normally put in backyards, but with the kind of lot we have, they'll actually work better for entertainment in the front, and it'll look good there, too. I want a firepit and some sort of pond/fountain--I'm actually thinking of an above-ground, square and blatantly artificial pond that overflows into a rigidly geometric channel/brook.

I am REALLY agaonizing over balancing the Asian and the modern-formal influences. Asian gardens are typically an abstraction or refinement of nature, and formal gardens are as artificial as you can get. If I get the balance wrong, it'll just look WEIRD. If I get it right, it will be fantastic.

One thing that I'm thinking hard about is bed-shapes. Should I go flow-y or geometric? I could go geometric and have sort of a cascade of rectangles, which would be build of cinderblock and could either be plastered over or (another decision!) faced with bluestone. The bluestone would be more subtle, and I'm thinking it would soften the modernism while keeping to the clean lines, and it would look better with less rigid plantings inside...

If I were in the UK, I'd have no problem finding a designer who often dows things of that sort. Similar styles are VERY popular there. Here, though, I haven't found anyone locally who has that kind of aesthetic or has demonstrated the ability to think along those lines. The house was designed by a European, so I shouldn't be surprised that I'm being attracted to modern European garden design to harmonize with it!

Weirdly enough, it would be easier to merge cottage and modern formal than Asian and modern formal! *g*

I have an acre of woodlands that will eventually become a more "pure" Japanese garden, though.

I need to pull the plat. We're taking possession in the fall, so I'll have all winter to prepare the beds before planting in the spring!

Nope, I'm not a landscape designer or anything like it. But the truth is that 90% of professionally landscaped gardens either leave me cold or bored. It's not the designers' faults--I'm not saying 90% are BAD. In fact, many that don't excite me are very good. (For example, I will never love a cottage garden.) I'm simply terribly picky about what it takes for me to go from "nice" to "WOW". I can appreciate designs that I know others like, and I like them much better than bad design, but they just don't thrill me. So chances are, if I hired someone, I wouldn't be thrilled with the result.

I've also always enjoyed landscape design--my roommate in college was a landscape architecture and design major, and I read all her textbooks for fun!--and I have been professionally employed as a graphic designer, so I do have the necessary "eye" for creating landscapes...eventually...for myself. And I am willing to end up spending the same amount of money doing it myself, getting it wrong, redoing it, tweaking it, etc., etc., as I would to hire as designer. And a lot more time. That way, the garden is much more MINE, too, which is important to me.

I like input and will probably hire a designer so that I can have a good eye critique my plans. And I'll certainly hire professionals to do some of the work! But I want the hear of the design to be mine. Otherwise, at some level, it will always feel like someone else's garden.

The roughest part will actually be memorizing a whole NEW set of plants. *sighs*

I'd consider using large river washed cobbles for parts of the ground plane, and using low walls built of concrete or concrete block and veneered with slate or stucco to create long horizontal planes to complement the horizontal lines and massing of your modernist house. You could then add a limited amount of new soil/compost, staying well away from the tree trunks, and would probably not hurt the roots if you kept this at 8 inches of new fill or less. Make sure you don't create a drainage problem by filling which would pond water at the base of tree trunks. Massing plants in combination with rock/walls, especially evergreen shrubs or ferns could go a long ways towards giving you a modernist/asian esthetic, and bamboos, grasses and Japanese Maples or Asian Magnolias could also be great understory trees to use.

In any case, free standing low walls with plantings behind them can replicate the look of raised beds, while still providing seating and scale, without the need for bringing in massive amounts of fill and endangering your mature trees.

I think the Asian/modernist mix you propose it totally do-able because you can focus on the ideas of simplicity, minimalism, and integrity of materials which was common to both. Also, I think that an Asian influence was not uncommon to many of the modernist landscapes of the day. Google for "Eichler homes" and check out the abundance of information available about their landscapes--often featuring just the Asian-influenced look you describe.

About the raised beds--maybe you can get the seating and level of enclosure you desire through the use of poured-in-place concrete seating walls around your patios and at strategic points in the landscaping plan. They don't need to retain soil to function for these purposes. I can picture a low seating wall with patio on one side and a sea of lush groundcover on the other. If poured-in-place doesn't appeal to you, maybe you could face them with a veneer stone (ummm-if that's not violating the "integrity of materials" clause).

bahia:

Oh, wow, the riverwashed cobbles with concrete blook walls could be stunning! That would give the softness/roundedness that a purely geometric garden would badly lack. Yes, I could absolutely see that working fantastically there. And, yes, I was thinking of veneering it either with stucco or a geometric stone. *g* If I go stucco, I might end up painting the brick of the house to give it cleaner lines to go with the stucco feel... Thanks!

I was thinking about 8" so I could have enough for putting in shrubs but not hurt the trees, so I'm glad to hear someone echo that. I was also planning on actually building the beds over several years, so as not to shock the trees! And thanks for the reminder to be careful of drainage. I may waterproof the slope of the wall gaurding the trunk and make sure the overall slope goes away from the tree.

I'm crazy about Japanese maples and dwarf evergeens, and I also adore azaleas, cherry trees, magnolias, wisteria, bamboo in rectangular containers (I don't know why, but I like them best sharply defined), hydrangea, camellias, dahlias, etc. *g* I like "shapely" grasses and plants with definite shapes, whatever they are. So that will all work well! I like less traditional flowers, too, but you'll never find a tea rose in my garden. Just don't like it.

sammie070502:

I gave up on actually having seating as an integral part of the walls on the level with the start of the bed as soon as I saw the trees. *g* But I still love it and may do some raised perimeter seating sort of as you describe! I like the feeling of enclosure in my gardens, so I would want something higher between areas (especially the lawn and entertaining area--as perfect as it is there, it is a bit of an odd placement, and I want to minimize the APPEARANCE of oddness and turn it into one of those "of course!" things instead...)

I didn't think to look up the Eichler houses! Many of those are in parts of CA that are rather warmer than my house, but the ideas should be solid, regardless.

Actually, a trip to the library might turn up a lot of relevant books. They would be in the design section, not the gardening section, and I'd expect pretty much any overview book published in the sixties to have something. My old Reader's Digest books certainly do.

There are plenty of places near the bases of established trees to plant shrubs. The trees haven't had feeder roots there for a couple of decades. The holes go between the structural roots.