Creating Beautiful Backyard Landscaping Inspired by Oriental Garden Design

Oriental garden designs recreate natural landscapes. Chinese and Japanese garden designs are created with few plants, carefully selected for meaningful and symbolic landscaping ideas, and look very artistic. Oriental garden design features paths winding through the vegetation, gradually revealing landscaping ideas and surprising the viewer with beautiful details copied from nature.

Oriental garden designs vary. Valleys, rocks, islands, ponds, streams, waterfalls, and bridges create beautiful Chinese and Japanese gardens with bright koi fish, offering serene and peaceful outdoor living spaces in an elegant and controlled style. Oriental garden designs use dwarf trees and shrubs, Asian lanterns, sand and gravel, pebbles, and rocks to give a Japanese feel to the spaces.

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Backyard landscaping ideas inspired by oriental garden design

There are three major styles of oriental gardens. The flat garden designs blend bamboos, flat stones, raked sand or gravel into elegant and simple landscaping ideas in oriental style. The dry garden designs are created with stones that build hills and dry water channels, mimicking a river flower. The water garden designs consist of water channels and trees that grow around rocks and an artificial lake or a pond.

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Oriental garden design requires careful planning and planting trees in separated blocks. Japanese pine, cherry, maple, azalea, evergreen trees, and irises beautiful blend green color with bold accents, creating a harmonious and balanced oriental garden design.

Moss can be used to cover the ground or create original and decorative accents with rocks. Nandina Domestica, bamboos, lotus Lillies, azaleas, pine trees, ophiopogon grass, maples, coprosmas, junipers, hostas, rucus, camellias, Ginko Biloba, flowering cherry, Zoysia tenuifolia are plants that can be used as a moss substitute. Moss, if it grows well in your area, ferns, birch trees, paperbark iris are excellent plants for Chinese and Japanese garden designs.

The water feature is an essential element of oriental garden design and can be added in any way, from creating a lake or adding a pool or pond to designing a bamboo flume or spout. The water element comes in a simple water bowl, a large, shallow, still reflection pool, or a dry stream created with river pebbles. The larger rocks should be placed where the current will be at its quickest, with the smaller stones being deposited where the current is slowly creating a sandbank.

Bridges are created with simple stone slabs suspended across narrow sections of streams, flat slates, or stepping stones floating as if suspended over the water or placed in a zigzag pattern, slowing viewers down to appreciate the garden design.

A small tea house, a pavilion, or gazebo are built for resting, meditating, or enjoying the beautiful view of your Chinese or Japanese garden design, tranquility, and serenity.

Photographs and landscaping ideas by Kathleen Shaeffer Design, Santa Cruz, California