Exhibitors
City gardens
Studio Lasso
Garden of Transience
Designer: Haruko Seki
Sponsors: Green and Arts Co and Urban Regenerate Association of Niigata
Contractors: Makoto Tanaka Landscape with Toshiki Motosugi and Kenzo Yamakoshi Design Studio
Click on the image to view a hi-res version
Created within an urban setting, the theme of this garden is tranquillity and a sense of the transience.
This small garden could be an oasis in which we can hide ourselves and nurture inner calm; a space in which to step away from busy daily life and become immersed in the opening of the senses. The garden is designed as a void to project light and shade. Mirror-like water reflects the movement of the sky, thus revealing the constant flow of nature. Bamboo sways and reveals the sound of the breeze.
The garden represents how we perceive space with a Japanese sensitivity, especially by changing the quality of light and obscuring the reality of the materials. This is a deliberately experimental garden where space can have its own world, by emphasizing the elements that are related to our memories - by the transient phenomenon of nature; as a piece of poem that awakens something deep inside our mind. Most of the plants are of Japanese origin, and the idea of a glass screen with a laminated diffuse interlayer is inspired by the traditional paper screens in Japan.
This is designer Haruko Seki’s first time at Chelsea, she says that while her garden does not use any of the traditional Japanese garden elements if "visitors can feel the Japanese sense of beauty, then my creation will be a success."