John Hall

The use of soil retention devices, such as the woven bamboo fascine in this photo, have long been used through the history of agriculture to fight erosion. We have installed a multi-layered fascine in areas around the Lower Pond where we want to control runoff and erosion from the iris beds. Behind the bamboo fascine is a wattle of miscanthis grass stems. Hidden below and wrapped in untreated burlap we have also installed a bundle (wattle) of willow whips. The Japanese term for the willow wattle is yanagi soda. In addition to the three bundled or woven materials and burlap we have also employed a layer of fine gravel to aid in filtering the water that escapes the iris beds and finds its way into the pond. This process will greatly reduce the amount of nutrients and debris that would otherwise have a negative effect upon water quality and our koi collection.

Our usual routine of moving the koi is necessary to be able to give the ponds a good cleaning. After leaf fall in autumn, the fish move from the Lower Pond to the Upper Pond. Sometimes they overwinter there, and at other times they are returned after the water is conditioned. Our city water contains, among other things, chlorine, chloramines, and ammonia. Chlorine breaks down naturally after a certain amount of time; the others need the help of chemicals or microbes to turn the water into a positive living environment for the fish.

The recent renovation of the Zig Zag Bridge required the Lower Pond to be empty for part of the process. The koi remained longer in the Upper Pond before they were moved back to the Lower Pond at the end of April. They were checked for health problems at that time and we found that they are all doing very well. Come and watch them swimming in front of the Heavenly Falls!

Cherry leaf spot, or shot hole, caused by the fungus Blumeriella jaapii, reduces flowering and weakens the tree. Cherry leaf spot often defoliates the tree by midsummer. Repeated defoliation makes the tree more susceptible to winter injury and may eventually kill it.

Symptoms

Leaves show small purple to brown spots with definite boundaries in early summer. The leaves turn yellow and fall. In July, the centers of the infected spots frequently fall out, giving a shot-hole appearance.

Cause

The fungus overwinters on fallen leaves. In spring following wet weather, spores form and winds blow them to infect leaves. When temperatures are favorable (60 to 75 degrees F), infection requires a wet period of only a few hours. Leaves are susceptible when fully unfolded—this usually occurs near petal fall. The initial leaf infections form spots, and more spores are produced in the spots. These spores are rain splashed to infect other leaves. Secondary spread and infection by spores continues repeatedly, whenever wet warm weather occurs, until leaves fall in autumn.

Control

Rake and destroy fallen leaves before spring. Fungicides should be used if plants are prematurely defoliated. Time spray applications beginning at petal fall; continue every 10-14 days if rain is predicted during the period. If initial infection is controlled, subsequent spray applications are unwarranted, however, we do recommend applications throughout the rainy season.

I have also attached information regarding the fungicide mixture I prefer to use. Bordeaux Mix fits well within our Integrated Pest Management Program. An additional recommendation is to inoculate the soil around the tree with beneficial soil microbes. There are beneficial bacteria that will control the populations of this harmful fungus, other fungal microbes will strengthen the tree through a symbiotic relationship.

Bordeaux Fungicide Mixture—How to Make Your Own Supply

This product is effective not only for fungal diseases but is also active for certain bacterial diseases such as fire blight of pear and apple.
The mixture can be prepared by combining hydrated lime or any type of finely ground lime with powdered copper sulfate (sometimes referred to as “bluestone”). Both materials should be available at farm and garden supply stores. However, some checking about may be required to locate the copper sulfate.

While Bordeaux Mixture can be prepared in several strengths, the recommended for dormant season application is a 4-4-50 formulation. The numbers refer to the ratio of copper sulfate and lime in 50 gallons of water. For example, 4 pounds each of these materials would be combined in 50 gallons of water. Since this amount of spray material is considerably more than needed by most gardeners, the recipe can be whittled down for preparation of smaller amounts of spray mixture.

For example, to prepare a gallon amount of a 4-4-50 Bordeaux Mixture spray, measure out 6 ½ teaspoons of copper sulfate and 3 tablespoons of hydrated lime. The lime should be mixed with a pint of water to make a “milk of lime” suspension. The copper sulfate should also be dissolved in a pint of water. The latter process may take several minutes.

Before mixing the lime and copper components of the mixture, one additional step (but an important one) must be carried out. Each container of these materials should be strained through a cheesecloth filter. If cheesecloth isn’t available, use cloth of a similar loose weave. The filtering is necessary to remove small pieces of lime or copper sulfate that won’t dissolve; otherwise, you’ll find these tiny pieces in the end of your garden sprayer tip, clogging up the works!

To make the filter, simply place the cheesecloth loosely over the top of another container and fix securely in place with a string or rubber band.
The filtered copper sulfate solution is added to a one-gallon container, followed by addition of the filtered lime solution. Enough water (about 3 quarts) is then added to the container to bring the total volume up to one-gallon.

You now have one gallon of Bordeaux Mixture ready for use. For two gallons, simply double the proportion of materials and prepare as before.
For best results, use your Bordeaux Mixture the same day of preparation and keep the sprayer agitated. Insecticides should not be added with the Bordeaux Mixture without first checking the insecticide label for possible compatibility problems.

What are some dormant season uses for Bordeaux Mixture? For peaches, use the material as a dormant spray for peach leaf curl, on apples and pears to help with control of fire blight, on grapes for black rot control, and on roses for black spot and other fungus disease control. A single dormant season application of Bordeaux Mixture won’t provide total control of these and other diseases the next season, but used along with other in-season control procedures, the task becomes a lot easier.

David M Cobb

Iyo blue stone originates from Ehime Prefecture, on the western corner of Shikoku Island, however there are other blue garden stones in other parts of Japan. Japanese gardeners name each stone based on the region of its origin: Iyo stone, Awa-ishi, Tanba, etc. There are over one hundred such regional stone types that are favored for gardens.

The Portland Japanese Garden’s Flat Garden features one exceptionally large Iyo stone, flanked to the front and left by two smaller Iyo stones. The arrangement commemorates Philip Englehart, the first President of the Japanese Garden Society of Oregon.

]]> http://japanesegarden.com/gardening/2010/02/13/iyo-blue-stone/feed/ 0 http://japanesegarden.com/gardening/2009/10/24/featured-garden-jackson-park-osaka-japanese-garden/ http://japanesegarden.com/gardening/2009/10/24/featured-garden-jackson-park-osaka-japanese-garden/#comments Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:15:19 +0000 Portland Japanese Garden http://www.japanesegarden.com/gardening/?p=119 Continue reading →]]> Chicago, Illinois

The Osaka Japanese Garden began over a century ago with the scraping and building up of a natural oak savanna sandbar—then a peninsula—for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. On what became Wooded Island, it was constructed with a Ho-o-den building that served as the government of Japan’s pavilion during the Exposition. The Japanese Garden survived through many changes and, after recent restoration efforts, has been known formally as “Osaka” since 1995—a tribute to Chicago’s sister city in Japan.

Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted was at first reluctant to accept the offer by the Japanese government to build a formal garden, temple, and tea house, because he had originally conceived of the island as a rustic resting spot and a retreat from the bustle of the Fair. But the offer was too good for Fair architect & manager Daniel Burnham to resist, and ultimately, the pavilion and Ho-o-den blended harmoniously with nature in a way the rest of the Fair buildings clearly did not—making it highly popular.

1893, Starks W. Lewis (Brooklyn Museum Archives)

The Japanese exhibition and pavilion at the fair helped introduce Americans to Japanese culture, religion, arts, and architecture. (Frank Lloyd Wright was one of several architects and artists affected by the Pavilion.) The exterior look and visible structure—form following function—as well as the interconnecting corridors and holistic flow of the “rooms” influenced Wright and others.

The Ho-o-den Pavilion remained after most of the rest of the Fair was torn down or burned, and Olmsted (followed by his sons) redesigned the island, lagoons, and park. Today, one special lantern, now found south of the current tea house, is probably the only original furnishing that remains—although some say this was made later as a replacement.

Changes since the Fair:

• In 1933–4 the city of Chicago, with help from the government of Japan, constructed a traditional Nippon Tea House at the Century of Progress World’s Fair on Chicago’s south lakefront, built a garden on Wooded Island’s northeast side, and refurbished the Ho-o-den at the renovated north end of the Island.
• The Torii Gate, Nippon Tea House, and lanterns from the Century of Progress were moved in 1935 to Wooded Island, near the Ho-o-den, and a traditional Japanese Garden was designed by George Shimoda and built thanks again to Japan.
• In 1973, Chicago re-established its sister city relationship with the city of Osaka, Japan. One of the goals of the Sister City program was to revive the Japanese Garden in Jackson Park.
• When Jackson Park was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, the Park Distinct added new landscaping, stabilized the shoreline, and restored and reconstructed most of the original features over the next decade.
• Efforts to restore the garden and rebuild a simplified tea house reached fruition, starting with reopening in 1981 and 1983, when the Garden restoration was completed and the garden rededicated. Featured were flowering trees, evergreens, shrubs, and flowers. Other features included a pavilion, moon bridge, rock waterfall, two granite symbolic boat docks, lanterns, and new landscaping.
• The garden was renamed the Osaka Japanese Garden in 1995.

Recent high temperatures and intense sunlight have caused us to delay the Nutrient Management Program for some weeks. Now, with a milder climate in the forecast, it is essential we resume—successful nutrient management is time-sensitive, requiring consistent levels of nutrition which aid in plant growth and pest & disease resistance.

Our program includes:

• Spraying applications of organic fish and mint oil solution, for foliar nutrition. (In warm weather, aroma dissipates within a few hours.)
• Embedding special blends of dry organic supplements in the pines’ feeding zones, to nitrify the soil.
• Introducing inoculations of soil microbes, including beneficial nematodes, in designated areas.
• Releasing a variety of beneficial insects throughout the garden:
• Ladybird Beetles (common “ladybugs”)
• Green Lacewings (a ferocious insect predator)
• Microscopic Trichogramma Wasps (no human threat)
• Praying Mantis (our best defense against the Northwest Pitch Moth)

Thank you, visitors, for your patience and understanding as we continue to implement a program which has already proven successful and highly beneficial to our Garden.

• Stroll Garden
• Tea Garden
• Natural Garden
• Sand and Stone Garden
• Flat Garden

Every day as I stroll through the Garden, I ponder the same question: What is the common thread that brings these unique spaces together into the single category of a Japanese garden? The answer seems to lie in their common design intent, which is more fundamental than the form or components. For me, nothing else ties all of these gardens together except for the fact that historically Japanese gardens are created around and inspired by the native landscape of Japan—in other words, by Nature itself.

Rocks and Water

Mountains and oceans represent much of the landscape of Japan, and they are reduced to the two primary and enduring components in the Japanese garden—rocks and water.

In ancient Japan, a group of huge boulders was often the site of sacred rites or worship of nature. For example, rituals were conducted at the boulders on Oki-no-Shima Island, the heart of Munakata Grand Shrine in Kyushu, as early as 4th century. A group of such rocks is called iwakura or iwasaka meaning “rock seat” or “rock boundary,” respectively. While the original meaning and function of the boulders has changed over time, these rocks are thought to be the origin of rocks as the most pronounced element of the Japanese garden today.

Japanese indigenous belief also considered a body of water, whether a river, lake, or ocean, a sacred entity. Forms of water sanctuaries vary: from a natural pond called shinchi or “deity pond” to the pebble-strewn sacred precinct of Ise Shrine for example. The “empty” space at Ise Shrine illustrates the customary use of pebbles as tangible and accessible forms of rock only to represent visually the notion of prohibited space. Shrines and torii gates were erected to delineate the entry to a sacred space with a mountain or ocean beyond, such as Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima Island. Water has been featured in the center of Japanese gardens from the beginning of 7th century (essentially the beginning of Japanese garden history) and its presence, small or large, real or abstract, is consistent throughout the entire course of Japanese garden history.

“Niwa,” the Garden

Early Japanese literature provides us with a glimpse of the origin of the Japanese word for garden with the term niwa. The word “niwa” as it is used today means garden, though it appears to have evolved from the earlier meaning of an “environment” or “territory.” In the Manyoshu (or Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, a compilation of 5th–8th century poems), there is a poem about a fisherman’s boat floating in his “niwa” on Muko Bay (present-day Bay of Kobe). Niwa in this context is his “fishing ground” or “territory,” representing a much larger area or context than the “garden” of the present-day definition. Moving from a hunting-gathering to a rice-growing culture, the early settlers’ environment or “niwa” was confined to and around their dwellings. However, as linguistic history has evolved, the word niwa now has the sole meaning of “garden.” What we call the Japanese garden today, conceptually represents our “environment.”

The Japanese attitude toward nature is evident in the Japanese garden as an “environment.” Objects such as stone lanterns and other manmade features assert the presence of man in the garden. Yet man’s attempts to recreate nature inevitably fall short of the sublime quality of nature itself. Understanding that one can never totally capture the beauty of wild nature, the gardener continues to strive nonetheless for that unattainable goal, knowing we are always finally subordinate to its incomparable beauty. Perhaps this is the key to an authentic Japanese garden.

These two auspicious plants are considered to favor good fortune.

On this occasion, we also welcomed two world-renowned guest speakers to the Garden, Dr. Makoto Suzuki and Mr. Shiro Nakane. With the Garden looking its best, black twine topknots were retied on several bamboo fences in honor of our distinguished guests.