HOW TO: Create a Wabi-Sabi Garden!

Wabi-Sabi One of 2018's Top Gardening Trends!

Brighten up this dreary day looking forward to the gardening season coming up! We are loving the newly popular, yet longstanding Japanese design style called Wabi-Sabi! This term can most simply be defined as “beauty in imperfection,” and we can show you how to incorporate natural elements in your landscape and live in harmony with nature and all its beautiful imperfections!

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This is great for everyone that is too busy to dead head flowers or pick their weeds!! The dried flower heads are a staple in the wabi-sabi garden style. If you garden with an eye for imperfection, your gardening can go from just maintained to art! Finally a garden style we can feel relaxed about!

What is Wabi-Sabi?  Wabi-sabi is a philosophy of aesthetics. This practice is from Buddhist teachings, and is all about aging gracefully, without enhancement! This beautiful design style of gardening allows you to free yourself from the struggles of perfection, allowing natural materials in your landscape to age. Wabi-sabi gardens allow nature to do what it does naturally, making us feel relaxed yet proud of our gardens!

How can I create this in my garden?

Grow Plants on Walls Allow plants to grow through walls or in between the cracks in your pavement for a blend of nature and manmade! You can even plant vines or ivy and train them to grow along sheds and walls. You can also plant moss around rocks and let them naturally grow over!

Pick Trees with Peeling Bark Choose trees like the River Birch or Paperbark Maple to add peeling bark to your landscape. Trees of this nature are particularly admired in the practice of wabi-sabi!

Leave the Weeds! It's okay to sit back and leave some weeds in your lawn. This will give your landscape the naturally imperfect wabi-sabi look! Decorative grasses also have this same effect on the landscape.

Plants with Seed Heads Plants with decorative seed heads are the epitome of the gracefully aging elements of wabi-sabi. Crape myrtles also have seed pods that emerge and break open in the fall for a great look.

Logs Leaving logs and stumps around your garden is not only wabi-sabi, it also gives home to wildlife!

Informal Plants Informal plants that can weave through borders are a great accent to your wabi-sabi look. Clematis in particular is great for this!

Garden Accessories Rusted garden ornaments or weathered wood can give your garden character while sticking with wabi-sabi. Enjoy natural elements like this simple wooden bench in your landscape!

Wabi-Sabi Plants at Bountiful Gardens

Plan ahead! Below are some plants that we have at Bountiful Gardens for you to add to create a wabi-sabi look in our landscape this upcoming season!

Vines

English Ivy Excellent climbers that cling to almost any surface! Small roots grow along the stems are easy to care for so you can plant them in a hard to reach place without worrying! It also loves shade, making it an ideal ground cover under a large, shady tree where little else grows.

Clematis Clematis is easy to grow with a long season of bloom and some of the plant kingdom's most beautiful flowers!

Honeysuckle A honeysuckle plant is a great addition to any landscape and will draw abundant wildlife with its sweet, yellow to bright-red blossoms.

Wisteria Beautiful violet-blue or lavender blooms over this vine appear in the mid to late spring. This twinning vine requires sturdy support and training them can keep them controlled and looking amazing!

Decorative Bark

Coral Bark Maple This beautiful small tree has a brilliant red-coral bark on its young branches, with color that only intensifies in the winter! Deeply cut, pale green leaves display attractive red margins and turn a vibrant, golden yellow in the fall season. In the spring, small red-purple flowers are pretty, but not showy. This maple is all about the bark and foliage!

Paperbark Maple This handsome tree has an oval to rounded crown and an open habit with upright branching. Its green leaves turn a scarlet red in the fall. It becomes even more distinctive an elegant with age, as its papery sheets of bark peel back to reveal a cinnamon-brown colored new bark, adding to its winter interest.

River Birch What makes this tree so intriguing is the salmon-pink to reddish-brown bark that exfoliates itself, revealing a lighter colored inner bark! Its leathery, diamond-shaped dark green leaves turn yellow in the fall.

Red Twig Dogwood Coming in different varieties, this beautiful, adaptable shrub offers four-seasons of interest. Vibrant red twigs are stunning in the winter garden, spring flowers yield small ornamental fruit that is attractive to birds, and all brings colorful foliage.

Yellow Twig Dogwood Noted for its bright yellow twigs in the winter, this rapid-growing, multi-stemmed, deciduous shrub is an outstanding ornamental feature. It's effective in shrub borders where plants can be combined with evergreens or a contrasting color of red twig dogwoods for interesting winter contrast.

Decorative Seed Heads

Sedum 'Chocolate Cherry' This dark-leaved sedum has a strong, compact structure. Pink-red blooms grow in the summer, that grow on dark purple shoots and seed heads that last until the end of the year.

Reed Grass 'Feather Fabulous' This vertical, clump forming grass has both leaves and flowers that stand strictly upright in a neat vertical line. It’s tolerant of a wide range of growing conditions from sun to light shade. Use it as a specimen plant, in large borders or masses. It’s also excellent as a backdrop that mixes we'll with colorful, blooming perennials!

Reed Grass 'Avalanche' Create a stunning vertical effect in your landscape with feathery stalks that emerge a reddish brown color in the spring, turning a golden color in the fall. The stalks make a great addition to cut flower arrangements and as a whole, make a great accent piece or dramatic mass planting.

Russian Sage Russian Sage has tall, airy, spike-like clusters create a lavender-blue cloud of color above the finely textured aromatic foliage. This vigorous, hardy, heat-loving and drought tolerant plant resists deer and pests. A superb companion for perennials and ornamental grasses.

Alium 'Millenium' The "Millenium" forms a compact, upright clump of glossy green, thick leaves which emit a slight smell of onion when crushed. Large 2", bright rosy purple, tightly rounded clusters of flowers appear on strong stems just above the attractive foliage.