Outside

Junko Liesfeld, a gardening consultant, celebrates nature from dawn to dusk in the expansive Japanese garden she has built over the last 18 years. Liesfeld grew up in Osaka, and she has re-created the spirit of her homeland—and her country’s reverence for nature—in the Rockville home she shares with her husband. She designed the main house so that she could see the river from every room. She wanted it all to “sit on the ground,” connected to the earth, so it is a long structure, running parallel to the river, with floor-to-ceiling windows in some rooms. The roof overhang is at least three feet—constructed, to the Japanese way of thinking, to provide a sense of enclosure and to create, along with the trees, a counterpoint to the openness of the sky.

Japanese have a special appreciation for “harmony” in all aspects of life, and Liesfeld has an innate sense of the concept. Her aim, when designing the house, was to blend American practicality with Japanese style. That’s why her Japanese home has an American fireplace. As she acknowledges, “I don’t like rules.”

Liesfeld’s garden begins to unfold from the moment the shaded drive along the river forks into a cobblestone lane. The first thing a visitor notices is the rocks—sizeable rocks, artfully placed along the drive, around the edges of the property. They function as a buffer between a large pond on the property and green spaces—the lawn, banks of ferns, swatches of moss. The scene is meant to imitate the coastline of Japan, where striking rock forms rise abruptly just off shore.

There are five styles of Zen garden: hill-and-pond, dry landscape, tea garden, strolling garden and courtyard. All are meant to capture nature’s essence, and they typically attempt to evoke the natural effects of wind and water over time. Liesfeld essentially has created a strolling garden, applying the techniques of a Japanese garden to her Virginia property. Her garden mixes the best of verdant Virginia topography with the contemplative spirit of Japan. It helps that many of the backbones of the Japanese garden—dogwood, redbud and cherry—are also basic Virginia plants.