Zen Garden Plants

Roles

• Zen gardens have special spiritual significance and may not contain any plants at all. Some Zen garden styles do incorporate plants that the gardener chooses to fulfill roles, such as representing scenery or serving as symbols. Planting a Zen garden may challenge your ideas about the importance of plants in gardens, as well as prompt you to consider plant choices in new ways.

Considerations

• Gardeners creating Zen-style gardens may have small areas to devote to their gardens. They may not have access or room for the specific plant species used in traditional Zen gardens. However, the creators of the Tsubo-en Zen garden in the Netherlands note that the Japanese have a long tradition of substituting plants native to a particular region for the traditional plants. In the Tsubo-en garden, they focused on choosing affordable, available plants suited to their plant hardiness zone. They cite the importance of factors such as size, suitability for shaping and how rapidly the plants will grow as other important considerations.

Woody Plants

• Many of the traditional Japanese plants in Zen gardens are low-growing evergreens, such as clipped azaleas and camellias. In colder areas of the United States, where gardeners need hardier shrubs, boxwoods (Buxus app.) and evergreen hollies (Ilex spp.) are attractive alternatives.

  Carefully pruned black and red pines (Pinus thunbergii and Pinus densiflora), symbols of longevity, are traditional evergreen trees for Zen gardens. Rather than undertake an intensive pruning program, however, consider planting dwarf cultivars of smaller pine trees, such as Pinus mugo.

  Although Japanese maples (Acer palmatum spp.) are typical deciduous trees for Zen gardens, small native maple species, such as Acer pensylvanica, a "snakebark" maple, can substitute, notes University of Tennessee Extension specialist, Hubert P. Conlon.

Herbaceous Plants

• In addition to low-growing shrubs that serve as groundcovers, Zen gardens feature mosses, ferns and other perennial groundcover plants. In addition to familiar plants with Asian origins, such as Hostas and some Iris species, fill in with native species of ferns and mosses to complete your landscape.