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Tag: Cloud Pruning

  • Jake Hobson’s Garden: A Tour of the Niwaki Founder’s Mini-Forest Backyard

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    Jake Hobson is a master pruner. He’s written two books on pruning: Niwaki: Pruning, Training, and Shaping Trees the Japanese Way and The Art of Creative Pruning: Inventive Ideas for Shaping Trees and Shrubs. And he’s the founder of Niwaki, a Japanese-inspired garden tool company headquartered in England. So, it should come as no surprise that his home landscape in Dorset is full of artfully shaped, precisely pruned shrubs and trees. But it isn’t your usual English garden with clipped hedges—nor is it a replica of Japanese gardens.

    “Everything I do is inspired by Japan, but I’m deliberately not making it all Japanese,” explains Hobson. “There’s no koi pond or red bridges.” Not only does Hobson eschew any decorative Japanese elements, he avoids ornaments altogether. “For me, a Japanese garden is creating a sense of a landscape—an idealized landscape—within the plot. If you bring in ornaments, you ruin the magic of scale. Whereas, if all you’ve got is plants, you can create a sense (if you squint and after a couple of drinks) that maybe you’re looking out into a deep forest.”

    Hobson has successfully created this illusion of landscape within his small space. Looking out the windows of the home he shares with his wife, Keiko, and their son, or gazing at photographs of Hobson’s green, layered garden, it’s hard to believe that it’s not much bigger than a tennis court. 

    When Hobson and his wife bought the house, the backyard had four sheds, a mismatched bunch of overgrown conifers, and a ton of concrete paths. They ripped it all out, leaving just the evergreen hedge that blocks the view from a neighboring building. Hobson commissioned a local carpenter to build a single new shed inspired by a Japanese “summer house” at the back of the plot. Then he planted dozens of evergreen and coniferous shrubs and trees that he has been training and pruning for the last fourteen years. The result is a garden that feels like its own miniature world, full of living sculptures.

    Let’s take a tour of Hobson’s garden, which he photographed himself. (You can follow him on Instagram @niwakijake.)

    Every year Hobson lets the grass grow long and mows a new path through it. “Zigzagging through the garden is a really Japanese thing,” he notes. “You never just go straight into a house.” At right are some of Hobson’s undulating boxwood and a Phillyrea latifolia, which Hobson calls a “cloud-pruned tree.” (He had been growing it for years at his parents home before moving it to the garden.)
    Above: Every year Hobson lets the grass grow long and mows a new path through it. “Zigzagging through the garden is a really Japanese thing,” he notes. “You never just go straight into a house.” At right are some of Hobson’s undulating boxwood and a Phillyrea latifolia, which Hobson calls a “cloud-pruned tree.” (He had been growing it for years at his parents home before moving it to the garden.)

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  • 10 Ideas to Borrow From Japanese-Inspired Gardens – Gardenista

    10 Ideas to Borrow From Japanese-Inspired Gardens – Gardenista

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    It’s no coincidence if Japanese gardens remind you of those scene-in-a-shoebox dioramas you made in grade school.

    A Japanese garden is a miniature world full of abstract shapes–rocks, gravel, and cloud-pruned plants–designed to represent the larger landscape of nature. And Nature. For centuries, Zen Buddhist monks and other Japanese landscaping designers have been trying to provoke deep thoughts, with design elements such as raked gravel paths and moss checkerboards and tiny bonsai trees trained to look permanently windswept.

    A Deep Question: How do you channel all those centuries of serenity to add a bit of Zen to your garden?

    The Answer: Steal one or more of our favorite 10 garden ideas from Japan:

    Featured photograph by Ye Rin Mok, for Creative Spaces, from LA Noir: Architect Takashi Yanai’s Humble-Chic Bungalow.

    Japanese Maple Trees

    A Japanese maple, in all its glory, stands in front of a home in Kagoshima, Japan. Photograph by Hironobu Kagae, from “Spend Every Day with Peace of Mind”: A Labor-of-Love Family Home in the Japanese Countryside.
    Above: A Japanese maple, in all its glory, stands in front of a home in Kagoshima, Japan. Photograph by Hironobu Kagae, from “Spend Every Day with Peace of Mind”: A Labor-of-Love Family Home in the Japanese Countryside.

    Plant a lacy Japanese maple. There are hundreds of different varieties of Acer palmatum, the maple tree native to Japan. With gracefully articulated leaves and diminutive stature (most don’t grow taller than 30 feet), Japanese maples tuck themselves easily into nearly any size garden. Varieties with multi-branched trunks have a sculptural quality and become a natural focal point in the garden.

    For more ideas, see Japanese Maples: A Field Guide to Planting, Care & Design.

    Landscape Rocks

    Above: Boulders as sculpture at a Japanese dry garden in Ithaca, NY. Photograph by Don Freeman, from Designer Visit: A Gray and Green Garden at Tiger Glen.

    Use rocks as a design element. In Japanese gardens, the pleasing shapes of large rocks and craggy boulders are reminders of the larger natural landscape that surrounds us. Depending on the size and shape, a rock also can serve as a functional element–as seating or a table–in the garden.

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  • Jake Hobson: An Interview with the Founder of Niwaki

    Jake Hobson: An Interview with the Founder of Niwaki

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    Today’s featured guest submitted the most succinct bio we’ve had the pleasure of receiving so far: “I studied sculpture / went to Japan / discovered gardens and tree pruning / founded Niwaki.”  To that we add: became a master of and missionary for cloud pruning (the art of Japanese topiary); introduced Japanese tools, including the iconic tripod ladder, to Western gardeners; and grew a brand that has, since its founding in 2007, become synonymous with Japanese craftsmanship and style.

    Contrary to the Quick Takes spirit, we asked Jake Hobson to elaborate on his answer: “When I first got interested in shaping and pruning I was in Japan. I kept seeing these amazing trees that looked so different to ours, and it took me a while to realise that it wasn’t because they were different species, but because they’d been pruned that way. Pruned to look like trees! I think that’s a very Japanese thing, refining something natural, reducing it to its essence. Since then, my passion has grown beyond the conceptual, to the practical. I love the physical side of pruning, both the immediacy of clipping—being in the moment—and the longterm consequences of what a single decision or cut can do. Generally, I’m quite impatient, but when it comes to plants, I love the sense of time involved.”

    Read on for Jake’s thoughts on good conifers versus bad conifers, his favorite and least favorite plants (both begin with “ph”), and more.

    Photography by Jake Hobson, unless otherwise noted.

    Above: Jake at work in his own garden. Photograph by Jake’s son, Digby Hobson.

    Your first garden memory:

    Playing in the sandpit with a huge spade. I grew up in Hampshire [in the UK] and actually have more memories of the woods than the garden. Campfires. The smell of wild garlic amongst coppiced hazel. The dark stillness of ivy covered understory beneath beech and yews.

    Garden-related book you return to time and again:

    Woody Plants of Japan, published by Yama Kei. It’s in Japanese and lists every tree and shrub imaginable. Would make a good partner to The Hillier Manual of Trees and Shrubs.

    Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.

    My mother’s old garden, with clipped Phillyrea, Rhamnus, bay laurel and boxwood, sitting with Eleagnus, Eriobotrya and yucca.
    Above: My mother’s old garden, with clipped Phillyrea, Rhamnus, bay laurel and boxwood, sitting with Eleagnus, Eriobotrya and yucca. “She planted, I pruned and shaped over 20 years,” he shares.

    Sculpture. Nature. Jaketure.

    Plant that makes you swoon:

    Anything laden with ripe fruit. Wineberries in particular, and figs.

    Plant that makes you want to run the other way:

    Red phormiums.

    Favorite go-to plant:

    Phillyrea latifolia. Left alone it makes the most beautiful small evergreen tree. Fiddled with, it’s brilliant for topiary, cloud pruning, and clipped shapes.

    Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:

    I’m still learning it: Soil prep really does matter.

    Unpopular gardening opinion:

    Above: “We recently built a new office extending out into the garden, so this view is only one year old, using one of my favourite trees, Cryptomeria japonica, pruned in the Daisugi style (you can learn about them in our upcoming Niwaki Field Report). They need a year or two to adjust to their new home, the box on the bank needs to settle in and fill out (newly planted box often looks poorly for the first year), but a pick and mix of seeds from Sarah Raven makes it all look nice.

    Conifers are great. Just get the right ones. We moved into a house that was called “Conifers.” I cut down all sorts of classic, ’70s style conifers and promptly replanted with all my favourites. Cryptomeria japonica, Pines thunbergii, Podocarpus macrophyllus—proper tree forms.

    Gardening or design trend that needs to go:

    The mess outside new housing developments. Photinias, phormiums, spirals, and worst of all, chestnut cleft fences.

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