This rambling garden along a strech of 4-lane residential road illustrates the blurred, conjunctive nature of Tokyo gardening (although this example is from Nagoya).
Pots, blocks, dirt and plants sit, stand on and burrow over and into each1 other in a rich semi-autonomous mess. Compare this to the modular, constrained and connected formal gardens and green spaces of the financial district.
1. from Shelton (1999)
Materials: Pots
Location: Nagoya
This raised empty plot supports a host of edibles, in a garden constructed from pots, old metal shelving, rags, netting and all kinds of junk.
Location: Nagoya, Japan
Quiet gardens nestle up against apartment complex walls and fences, far from the controls of the centre – in planters and planted directly in the earth.
These side spaces, edges – passage territories – are just the right mix of light, elbow room and ‘half-hiddenness’ to act as invitations to garden.
(see The Open City by Richard Sennett (PDF link) for a discussion of passage territories)
Materials: Pots
Location: Nagoya
Garden built on parking area – constructed of planks and breeze blocks. Notice that the garden is actually an aggregation of pot plants, which look like a cohesive whole due to rotting autumn leaves. Superb.
Materials: Planks, Pots, Breeze Blocks
Location: Akishima, Tokyo
Pot plants outside a suburban residential office demarcate parking space, prevent cyclist curb-cutting (safety), set the limits of the official office zone of use, and beautify.
Materials: Pots
Location: Akishima, Tokyo
(Originally posted on Tokyo-DIY-Gardening)
In an expensive back street off Aoyama Dori in Shibuya resides this lush and intense pot plant collage. Piece by piece, plants in pots have been added to the structure, and secured with a variety of spur-of-the-moment wire and string fixes.
I love the sense of time and process present in these types of garden collages – unplanned and hectic but built up slowly over many years. Temporary in form and materials but not in presence. A type of green urban archeology.
Materials: Wire, String, Pots
Location: Shibuya, Tokyo
(Originally posted on Tokyo-DIY-Gardening)
