Dan Pearson

This week we welcomed our friends from Hokkaido, who have travelled all the way from their snowbound island to steal a march on spring and reconnect with their British gardening fraternity.

I first met Midori Shintani in 2008 when she was appointed as Head Gardener at the Tokachi Millennium Forest and Shintaro Sasagawa not long after, when he joined her as Assistant Head Gardener. With the exception of the Covid lockdowns, we have seen each other once or twice a year since then. An annual visit from me to discuss the progress of the garden and one or both of them here to spend time at Great Dixter and a few days at Hillside.

It has been five years now since they returned to Hillside and they came bearing gifts. Some beautiful tea, a box of Japanese sweets and the obligatory seeds, a gardener’s gift bringing promise. A connection in the form of a selection of Japanese beans, which we will grow together in our seprate vegetable gardens and the challenge of germinating the seed of ethereal Glaucidium palmatum and Adenophora triphylla var. japonica collected from the forest.

Appropriately, the Yoshino cherry broke first buds in a hanami moment on the day they arrived. They walked the garden and the land whilst we finished up our working day. It is good to mark the time in gardener’s observations, noting how the orchard has grown and the garden knitted together. With their gardener’s eyes, they could see the promise and configurations of a garden very recently cut back to the ground. This is the common language we share. 

We always make time to garden together when they are at Hillside. When they visited in March 2017, we extended the snowdrop trail together. I was buying 2000 in-the-green bulbs a year at that point, because my own clumps were not large enough to split. Midori said I should be planting 10,000 a year and I took note. The following year I purchased 5000, but I needed the many hands to make light of the work and missed the joy of doing a job together. The snowdrops we planted then are now ready to split, so we will continue where we left off, lifting and dividing and jumping them over path. I think of the two of them every time I pass this stretch we worked on together and I will think of them again as we walk through the trail once it is extended.

This year we are spending a few days here to settle them into UK time. As well as gardening both Midori and Shintaro are very interested in British food and, with their own culture of foraging, particularly wild food. So today we picked nettles together, which Huw will make into the soup that they have both heard much of, but never tried. In return Midori will show us how to make tempura from the horsetail shoots that are lining the ditch.

On Monday we head first to Great Dixter for Midori to see old friends and then on to Sissinghurst to meet the gardeners and look at Delos, which they have yet to see. At the end of next week we travel back to Japan together to visit the site of a new project on the mainland, where we are collaborating on a large site that has an exciting future. I will hopefully be able to share more of this with you as things progress. When our fortnight together ends, I will return to the rush of spring in full spate, while they will travel back in time to the beginning of snowmelt and a spring yet to start.

Midori Shintani

It has been more than 15 years since I started visiting the UK. The initial idea of my UK visit was only one thing. To gain a deeper understanding about garden designer, Dan Pearson. I believed that was the most important approach to create the beautifully harmonised garden at the Tokachi Millennium Forest. I vividly remember my first visit to his studio. Dan showed me a copy of “In Praise of Shadows”, a book he said was his favourite. And it is also a favourite of mine. That masterpiece filled with Japanese aesthetics, made me realise that our conversation had already begun.

Since then, the conversation between East and West has deepened. I have been blessed with wonderful friends in the garden. The most precious thing I learned in the UK was to nurture my own plantsmanship. And to share it with others. Someone once said that to meet plants is to meet people. Here, for me, meeting people is meeting plants. Whenever I think of someone’s face, there are always the plants that share their lives with them.

I usually don’t visit many places here, because I find pleasure in visiting one place over the years and seeing the changes and developments. In particular, visits to Great Dixter are essential. My first visit was when I was still a new Head Gardener. As I had no senior Head Gardener in Japan to mentor me, every moment I spent with Fergus was an invaluable learning experience. Needless to say about plantsmanship, but also about the joys and difficulties of leading a team as Head Gardener. I respect him responding to the times by evolving the concept of the garden, while protecting its one and only historic tradition.

Here at Hillside, I have seen the process of the land long before the garden was created. In the beginning, I remember the three of us enjoying the sound of knives and forks in the pies Huw baked for us at the little table by the fireplace in the old farmhouse. I have joined in creating snowdrop trails along the stream, run around with new family member dogs, and experienced a delightful work on picking plums in the summer. I have witnessed that the British Arts & Crafts in life with the garden has been nurtured here at Hillside. My new discovery of Hillside this year is the native primulas that are gloriously spreading helped along with human hands.

I also learned anew this time that in early spring, all subsequent visions of the garden are promised. I always wish that the garden could be a place where someone’s soul returns. As I look up at the plums growing and flowering so pleasantly, I realise that, before I knew it, Hillside has become that place for me too.

Shintaro Sasagawa

What brings me to the UK?

It is simply to seek some experiences that I cannot get in Japan. And I want to broaden my horizons. Sometimes it could be an opportunity for me to objectively compare ourselves between the UK and Japan.

I have already felt and learned a lot in these few days in the UK. I was impressed by the wonderfully delicious pasta with wild garlic and green vegetables that Huw made for us on our first day at Hillside. We share the joy that it came from the nature around here and the way we live in connection with plants as the seasons change. It reminds me of the Swedish rose hip soup called nyponsoppa made with Rosa rugosa and the grilled Matteuccia panino that Midori cooked for me at Tokachi. I want to develop such a way of living myself.

I have learned that planting design skill can make an obvious difference at the beginning of the growing season. I still am analysing how it could be. I feel the depth of the planting design already. I would like to keep monitoring the balance of the selection of plants, the setting of the plants and the combinations of them all.

The deep level of understanding can be gained by actually seeing, touching and feeling the atmosphere of a place and listening to the people who are involved there. It can never be gained by looking at pictures. And the process of this real meeting is an essential joy. Meeting new plants and meeting plant people brings me to the UK. And it is always fun to play with dogs at Hillside.

Photographs: Huw Morgan | Published 16 March 2024