Creating a Japanese Garden
A garden makeover was a challenging but rewarding DIY project
When we bought our home in Kent, we had acquired quite a large, but not very appealing, semi-circular area of front garden. It was basically an expanse of driveway gravel with a few shrubs randomly planted in borders which had been created using upturned patio bricks.
The good news was that there was clearly potential here for a garden redesign project.

My wife, who’s Japanese, spent some time figuring out what we could do with the front garden. One day she came up with a bright idea – if the soil was good enough, perhaps we could create a Japanese garden there.
This seemed like a promising idea, although neither of us had ever done anything like this before. We weren’t really sure where to start.