The Garden

at left: The garden layout
North is to the right.

For a better layout, see the pages ‘Seasons in the Shady Garden’, also in this section.

What to do with a small patch of land, little sun, and a neighbourhood full of wild cats? Modest ambitions seemed prudent. Our house was empty for some time before we moved in; the owners spread about twenty centimetres of sand over what used to be planting beds, to keep the place from going to jungle. Finding a place to start planting therefore involved a fair bit of archaeology. The battle with the cats was also destined to be lost, at least in the early months: what cat could resist an easily traversed space covered with sand? We still have one area – call it a well, or crevasse – between the parking area and the house that is inaccessible to people but where cats can easily pass through. I spent about two years tipping coffee grounds into it in the belief that cats are repelled by the smell of coffee. They are not. The only thing that prevents a cat from going where it wants is to put something in its way; we inadvertently closed off both ends of the well with uncontrolled greenery, and that seems to be keeping the cats out, almost all the time.

Our house fills most of a small lot, with a strip of land between fifty centimetres and one metre wide running around the edge. Not much light ever comes from the north, so it doesn’t matter much that a large house sits uphill from us in that direction. Unfortunately, the west side is taken up with parking and the street, and another house blocks all the light coming from the south. Things are fairly clear to the east, but that only helps us in the morning, and the planting beds on that side are shaded by a fence. In fact, there isn’t a patch of space in our garden that is not in full or partial shade for at least two-thirds of the day. Given this layout, we abandoned our plans to grow food plants, and anything else that might require plentiful sunshine.

That last sentence requires some modification. We actually abandoned these plans after our first growing season, when we attempted tomatoes, Japanese eggplants, cucumbers, assorted herbs, and even zucchini. The tomatoes – the vine and not the fruit – grew, and grew, and grew: grew, in fact, right up through the hedge on the western edge of the lot, in a desperate bid to catch the afternoon and evening sun. This ultimately resulted in the odd spectacle of an evergreen hedge producing mini tomatoes right up until winter. It was such a compelling sight that I didn’t have the heart to cut it back; I eventually drew out the desiccated stalks the next February. We tried tomatoes again last year, in a pot, and discovered that if one puts out tomatoes in a pot in the rainy season, the result is a weedy looking plant with brown-black rotted fruit hanging from it. As for the other food plants: the zucchini produced flowers before it wasted away, and the eggplant and cucumber each managed one spectacularly large fruit before they died. Kyushu is on the same parallel as parts of North Africa and Lebanon, and if a garden has sunshine, the full range of Mediterranean herbs will survive even the monsoon rainy season between June and July. But not in our garden.

We have no choice but to live with our lack of sunshine, but the soil question was another matter entirely. No one can afford to neglect the soil in their garden: we did, in our first year, and nothing worked. So now we try to improve it, which usually means replacing what we found here with something we buy at a shop. We don’t drive, and the nearest garden centre is a twenty-minute walk away, so the improvement process has been gradual: one or two ten-litre bags at a time. Last fall we bought a small composter: one can get any number of different sizes, and the one we decided on would fit comfortably on an apartment balcony. The illustration on this page shows where we decided to make planting beds: each one catches at least a few hours of sunshine every day. The fences enclosing this lot are made of cinderblocks, and chemicals leaching from them tend to make the soil more alkali. Our area’s natural soil is a kind of red clay: rock hard and thoroughly waterlogged. We run into it about thirty centimetres below the topsoil. Our neighbour to the south tells us that there used to be a small pond in our front garden; it reappears every time it rains heavily. I suspect this means that we also suffer from poor drainage.

The tone of all our garden books suggests that everyone who has a garden outside the land of Cockaigne can produce a catalogue of problems at least as long as this one, so we are not discouraged. For all practical purposes, we have a shady container garden: even the planting beds are like big containers resting on a layer of inorganic material. Many different things grow well in pots, and it turns out that plastic and terracotta both are reasonably priced, even in Japan. If we were more ambitious, we could even try moving pots around to catch the sun at different times of the day. It seems, though, that the best thing to do when laying out a garden is to try to make spaces where a variety of things can stay put with only occasional intervention.

The pages ‘Seasons in the Shady Garden’, also in this section, describe which plants and techniques enjoyed success under the conditions I describe here. It turns out that the most important lesson to learn in the early stages of setting up a garden is to be patient, and to buy a comfortable shovel. The classic shape is the best: one with a good, solid handle grip, a triangular blade, and a lip at the top of the blade so your foot can help give you more digging power. Other essentials include a mesh bottomed soil sifter, preferably one with a selection of different interchangeable mesh attachments, a basic garden tool set with a hand trowel and fork, and a selection of buckets and heavy, dark plastic bags for soil mixing.

These are the tools required for keeping things in. To keep things out, particularly cats, we suggest lots and lots of plastic spikes: we buy them in square interlocking sheets with an anchor spike on one side. Eventually the cats learn to leave a spiked planting bed alone, except when they get desperate or adventurous. Insects are impossible to keep out, but in a small space like ours it is possible to pick them up and toss them away. Crazy as it may sound, disposable chopsticks – ‘waribashi’ here in Japan – are best for plucking caterpillars and similar slow, crawly things off the plants. With sufficient training, you can even use them to catch grasshoppers. This also demonstrates that gardens are highly effective at giving rise to a particular kind of madness.

2002/05/25, with minor modifications in August 2003

Date posted: 2003-09-01