Art Biotop Water Garden

The garden, by a Japanese practice, lies in a meadow beside a new hotel in a mountain landscape. The meadow was once a rice paddy, and before that a moss-covered forest like the one still around it. Traces of that history remain, including an old sluice gate for drawing water.

The hotel site next door was a forest, and many trees would have been cut to make room. Since the forest and the meadow were almost the same size, the design team moved the whole forest onto the meadow. The move layers the site’s past on itself: paddy and mossy forest, landscapes that were once here but never met, now overlap.

The trees were replanted one by one, and water from the old sluice gate fills countless ponds tied into the existing irrigation, each flowing at its own rate. Ponds and trees are spread at a density never found in nature, with moss laid carefully in between. Nothing was added or thrown away, yet a nature no one had seen before appears.

The landscape is planned the way a building would be, at a large scale and with fine precision. Luminous spaces open between 318 trees of distinct shapes, and 160 ponds are placed among them. The trees, beech, oak and hornbeam, are deciduous species that would not normally grow so close to water, and waterproofed ponds make the new coexistence possible. The project asks how people might shape nature in detail, so that natural and human environments come closer together.