KotoJazz 71: Mini Garden 3- Tree Base Mounds

There are creative ways to beautify city tree base mounds and their small spaces.

Here’s a simple yet gorgeous arrangement with two orange tea hucheras on each side of the space. It also features a few mini – ferns as well as ground cover types. The tree mound has a meandering black creek rock dry creek on one side of the tree mound. Large rocks are placed around the mini- garden to give a natural look and feel image.

This offers an attractive alternative to the rather unattractive look of most tree base mounds you see around town; another good example maximizing limited space. This one is located on 15th in Capitol Hill, Seattle.

KotoJazz 70: Water Features in Mini Garden

There are two water features in this mini garden my brother designed which bring his garden to life — a natural looking wood plug-in mini waterfall and the black pebble dry creek and pond.

With the water feature in the background and the black pebble pond in the foreground, he’s created a paradise in his small back yard with three Japanese maples – one purple lace maple to the right, a taller green Japanese maple providing shade to shade plants and flowers below such as hostas and Japanese irises, and a feathery lighter lace maple behind the water feature in the back corner of his space.

The garden also uses a wide variety of ground covers, including one flowering mound of pink in the foreground next to the deck along with blue flowering groundcovers, giving rise to natural imagery. This Japanese mini garden works in this small space because all the plants chosen complement each other, and everything is proportionately sized correctly, including white mini lantern on the side.

KotoJazz 69: Yellow Ornamental Grasses

Probably due to their unique and resplendent colors, I would say there are two top Japanese ornamental grasses that rival each other in popularity – the Japanese red blood grass and Japanese yellow forestgrass.

Of the two, only one is indispensable to a complete Japanese garden image – the forestgrass. In addition to its bright yellow hue, the Japanese forestgrass displays as a flowing cascading ornament unmatched in the world of grasses.

Varieties of yellow hairgrass and sedgegrass are more hardy versions. They can be used to accent a garden or garden area with a simple placement in the foreground of any garden area as pictured above.