Exploring a hidden Japanese garden in Sydney | Garden Design and Inspiration | Gardening Australia

Konnichiwa. Now you may think I've been transported to Japan, but I'm a lot closer to home. I'm in the western suburbs of Sydney, and this is the Auburn Botanic Gardens. There's nearly 10 hectares of themed gardens here, and the Japanese Garden and Cherry Blossoms attract thousands of visitors each year, so I'm keen to see more. Paul Clark is the supervisor, and he has a special connection to this place and its plants. How important is the Cherry Blossom Festival to the Auburn Botanic Gardens? It has become a huge part of the gardens over the last seven or eight years. It's the most popular time to come to the gardens. It's when we get our most visitors by far. It really has defined Auburn Botanic Gardens, and it's made us stand out from the crowd. These ones here, Prunus Campanulata, they're our first blossom trees that flower every year. So these are the bell-shaped cherry, or the Taiwanese cherry. Here we have Prunus Cellulata, a true Japanese cherry, the one that you'll see in Japan, the one you see them having their picnics under. Large 20-metre, 30-metre tree in Japan. Here we have it growing in Sydney's climate. Not so suited, but we have sort of five of these here, about 20 years old, these trees. It's one thing to hold a festival for cherry blossoms, but how do you know that they're going to flower? We've picked Prunus Bleriana for our Sydney climate. These guys don't need as much chill as the Prunus Cellulata, which is the traditional Japanese cherry. These guys flower at the end of August every single year. Spectacular though they are, there's more to the Auburn Botanic Gardens than just cherry trees. It's a hidden gem. The premise was a garden of a thousand views, so a thousand different ways to have a look at the gardens. The gardens is based around the large Japanese lake, and one of the key principles for the plants and the rocks is naturalness. So the absence of the hand of the gardener, the way we trim our plants and shape our plants has to look like a natural form, and so that informs the way we maintain our gardens. In Japanese gardening, we use a limited palette of plants. Here we have some of the main ones that we use. So we have Camellias, we come down to these Dome Japanese Buxus, and the lower levels are made up of Azaleas, different types of Azaleas and the Mondo grass. So what we're doing here is we're using the features of the plants, the flowering and the foliage, to really give the garden a natural feel. The doming of the plants and the pruning techniques is another feature that we use. So in that sense, it's actually less is more when it comes to the plant list itself. 100%, and we use those plants, these flowering plants, to get different effects for different seasons. Now, is it true in Japanese design that not having straight lines makes it difficult for the spirits to move? That's a bit of a Western concept, actually. The true meaning of having a zigzag bridge in your garden is to make sure you're present in the gardens at the same time. So as you walk across here, you need to be present in the moment, otherwise you're going to fall in the water yourself. That's true. We need to be present in the gardens, we need to be watching what we're doing, and then we make our way across safely. Real simple life principles, really. Yeah, exactly. Feature trees like conifers are a really important part of Japanese gardens, aren't they? Yeah, we've got a lot of conifers and a lot of pines here, such as this one. This is a Japanese red pine, or Pinus densiflora. It's got that really gnarly growth that we expose these trunks. And one of the things that they do in Japan, which we do here also, is we rub these, the trunks here, just to reveal that red new growth or new bark there. Wow, it's stunning. Yeah, and it just sort of reveals itself straight away. And it doesn't hurt the tree at all, it's just shedding that old bark and revealing the new red undergrowth. What a special place. I've had a taste of Japan, enjoyed the spectacular cherry blossoms, and I haven't even left home. If that was just a taste, then I am hungry for more.