Book review: Tokachi Millennium Forest
Tokachi Millennium Forest: Pioneering a New Way of Gardening with Nature
By Dan Pearson with Midori Shintani
The Tokachi Millennium Forest is a 400-hectare ecological restoration project created through the restoration of what was formally degraded farming and commercial forestry land in Hokkaido Japan. The land was originally acquired by Japanese newspaper magnate Mitsushige Hayashi 30 years ago with the vision to make his business carbon neutral via the creation of a new public park. His concept for The Tokachi Millennium Forest was to help bring people closer to nature and to create a sustainable garden for 1,000 years.
At the turn of the millennium, Dan Pearson (the English garden and landscape designer who is known for his wild, naturalistic garden style) was invited by Hayashi to become part of the Tokachi Millennium Forest project. This book tells the story of his planning and ongoing work to develop and evolve the Millennium Forest project, together with insights from Head Gardener Midori Shintani who is able to weave in a more traditional Japanese perspective.
The Tokachi Millennium Forest (which first opened to the public in 2008) strives to bring together the traditions of gardening in Japan with a contemporary global naturalistic gardening style, merging the culture, aesthetics and gardening practices of both East and West. Pearson undertook extensive research and planning for the project including learning about wabi and sabi; the traditional practice of finding beauty in imperfection and accepting transience, the natural cycle of growth, decay and death.
When Pearson arrived at Tokachi, work had already begun to regenerate the woodland flora, which was accessed by a series of walkways, a restaurant and trails but visitors were clearly overwhelmed by the scale of the surroundings. His key design task was to add layers to integrate the land forms and add naturalistic planting to entice visitors across the whole site to deliver “a way in to the natural environment that was easy, familiar and unthreatening”.
Pearson’s book takes us through his design process, the ongoing creation of each key aspect of the garden and the challenges due to a compressed growing season and snow-covered ground in winter (with temperatures down to -25 degrees Celsius). He examines the approaches to integrate the visibly cultivated spaces such as the meadow garden, the productive gardens, and the subtly gardened native woodland gardens. Pearson also reflects on unusualness of his naturalistic planting design in Japan where the interpretation of nature has traditionally been controlled and balanced.
The centerpiece of Pearson’s Garden plan is the Meadow Garden which is given the most detailed description in the book. The Meadow has been designed to be an immersive and creative mix of indigenous plants and selected more familiar introduced flowers and plants to collectively create natural look that evolves through each season.
Although it is clearly Pearson’s book, the interludes written by Head Gardener Shintani Midori are a real highlight and full of insights into the real Japanese culture. Midori highlights the traditional Japanese reverence for nature and how the ancient Japanese have a long affinity with nature and plants, including a calendar which records 72 seasons. As she discusses the edible garden, Shintani highlights the concept of “Shun” or the Japanese concept of consuming each ingredient in its prime season. The Shun concept focuses on eating each food at the peak of its season which allows humans become connected to the biorhythm of the seasons ensuring a healthy life in harmony with nature.
For the knowledgeable gardener, there is a lot of detail on the construction and maintenance of the garden and he is upfront about the experiments with plants that have failed to thrive and the necessary compromises of time, climate and money. While his writing is generally accessible and well laid out in concise chapters, in several parts Pearson’s writing style can become a bit dense and dry for less technical gardeners like myself. His use of botanical names and technical terms risks making several chapters feel a bit like a manual.
The key to the success of this book is my view is the quality photography that captures the beauty and development of the Tokachi Millennium Forest project across each season as well and for each of the core elements within the garden. The photographs also serve to make clear what may not always be so in the text.
This book is an interesting read and visual experience that both inspires and draws you to Japan and to visit the Millennium Forest. Well worth a read.
@BlackTealBay books rating 7.5/10
