The botanical garden Water Garden, an elaborate creation combining speculative and modern garden elements, and designed to thrive within nature, was designed by Junya Ishigami.
Junya Ishigami’s earthwork landscape is nestled among the foothills of Japan’s Nasu Mountains. The sprawling environment is generated with the aim of obscuring the boundary between architecture, landscape architecture, art, and environmentalism. While the garden is carefully modeled and reliant on technological artifacts, the work is both highly artificial and undeniably natural — a living organism that grows and changes by its own inherent dynamics. The temporal characteristics of the landscape are revealed with the existence of former, existing, and future layers.
The water garden, which is attached to artist's retreat Art Biotop, is formed of 318 trees planted around 160 small ponds. These ponds, or biotopes, are miniature habitats for aquatic plants and animals.
"The project demonstrates how we can interact with and make our imprint on nature without destroying it."
