Japanese Garden Pond Design

related article: Koi Fish in a Garden Pond

How to design a Japanese Garden Pond for Koi Fish ?

Pond owners searching for inner calmness, refreshing and conscious experience of nature recently decide to design a Japanese water garden. With literature about Asian culture, Feng Shui and Zen their goal is a Japanese garden pond design surrounded by the appropriate far-east Japan Garden. Japanese garden art is the poetic reduction of nature to selected plants, stones and garden elements like pond bridges, garden benches and paths that wind their ways through the garden landscape. A popular highlight is a fishpond with Japanese Koi fish.
 

A Japanese garden pond for Koi fish needs to be at least 1,30m - 1,50m (4.2 - 5 ft) deep to provide enough space for these Asian decorated fish to swim around and to guarantee their hibernation in a pond that cannot freeze through.

Any Japanese water garden design is an idealised microcosms that offers silence and calmness to its visitors and invites them to meditate.

You create a  harmonic landscape of small lakes and mountains in miniature with the fine balanced combination of flora, rocks and garden decor . The sounds of water, visual contrasts and reflections of light provide additional effects in a garden pond à la Japan.

 
Besides garden decor from far-east like Buddha, bamboo fountains, watering places for birds, Asian pond bridges and garden lighting you can find in your nearby garden centre numerous Asian garden plants like cherry tree, Japanese maple, azaleas, magnolias, China-grass and winter-resistant bamboo. Even Asian pond flora like lotus and East-Asian water lilies or banks plants like papyrus, ferns and moss are available to design your own Japan pond.
 

Designing a Japanese Water Garden

One of the most popular and fascinating plants in a Japanese garden design are cherry trees. In Japan these trees are honoured with special ceremonies during blossom season. We suggest to plant one or several cherry trees in the centre of your Japanese landscape. The light pink and white cherry blossoms create a lovely smell and will please you with breath taking colours. A Japanese cherry tree is for sure the admired highlight in your Japan garden during spring. We have to advice you not to plant any deciduous trees next to your garden pond, because lots of autumn leaf-fall will fill up your pond and produce mud and gases during winter. You can take precautions with a pond netting cover.
 

Japanese Azaleas are a very appropriate and eye-catching plants near a Japanese aquatic garden. These flora grows flat roots and often do not get higher than 1 m (3.3 ft). Azaleas are very impressive stand-alone plants with their evergreen foliage.

You will enjoy beautiful blossoms in white, pink, red till violet colours of Japanese Azaleas in spring.

 
Japanese Maple is an other Asian plant that shouldn't be forgotten in a far-east garden design. Most garden centre offer Japanese maple that only reaches a height around 2 meter (6.5 feet). These trees fit perfect in a small Asian garden design. Other species of maple reach heights of 6 meter (20 feet). During the year these trees are a great pleasure with their tapering red and green leaves. An unbelievable joy you will find, when autumn changes these leaves in all colours between yellow and deep red.

Japanese garden art is dominated by conscious positioning of step stones, rocks and further garden decor that should create a harmonic tension in the microcosm in a contrasting manner. Popular stone are basalt and granite. A Japanese garden pond bridge build from stone or wood combines different "worlds" inside your Japanese garden pond design. Asian stone benches invite visitors to rest, relax, watch, discover, and to meditate. The bubbling of a little bamboo fountain will mix the rustling of leaves in the wind and the sounds of the waterfall, that will provide additional oxygen for the Japanese aquatic garden. A stone Buddha or sculptures of animals can emphasize the Japan-Garden at night together with many-edged stone lamps.
 

Japanese Garden Pond Design: Summery