The place

On Japan’s northernmost island, the Tokachi Millennium Forest is an ambitious and visionary environmental conservation project, with a 1000-year sustainable vision. Intended by entrepreneur Mitsushige Hayashi to offset the carbon footprint of his national newspaper business, the park is spread out across a plateau and the wooded foothills of Hokkaido’s central Hidaka mountain range.

The brief

Hayashi’s vision for the park is intended to halt the loss of natural habitat on Hokkaido, and to cultivate a deeper appreciation of nature by offering Japan’s mainly urban population the chance to engage with the landscape, forest, gardens and farms. We were asked to develop a masterplan alongside local landscape designer, Fumiaki Takano, to meet Hayashi’s vision and then design a number of gardens to serve as visitor attractions and destinations within the forest.

The design

The Earth Garden creates a connection between a family restaurant and the impressive mountains beyond, with undulating landforms that create a series of dynamic waves in the grassland. These are intended to arouse visitors’ curiosity, provide a soft playscape for children and invite them to explore the wider landscape. The ornamental Meadow Garden offers bold sweeps of colourful massed perennials, many of which are Japanese natives found growing in the Entrance Forest. This garden provides a landscape of delight and wonder, introducing visitors to the region’s native flora and fauna in a heightened aesthetic environment.

Designers, as well as private gardeners, are now more likely to create blended plantings, imitating the pattern of plants in natural environments. There is an irony that one of the best publicly-accessible examples of this is to be seen, not in Britain, but in Hokkaido, where the British designer Dan Pearson has created a series of blended perennial plantings at the Tokachi Millennium Forest near Obihiro. The planting style here, and its sensitive management by gardener Midori Shintani, offers Japanese visitors a good insight into an exciting and beautiful new way of using plants.

Noel Kingsbury

Engaging a largely urban population with a relatively wild environment is key to its success. From the agricultural fringes of the park, boarded walkways twist through glades and across streams, passing through a succession of wild flowers and plants. These inspired Pearson’s Meadow Garden, a mix of indigenous and ornamental plants in a matrix of colours. The most innovative part of the scheme is Pearson’s design for the blank, flat hectare of land in front of the restaurant which looks out on to the mountains. Most visitors confronted with this vista, retreated to the comfort of the restaurant. To coax· people out, Pearson created a series of massive earthforms, which he based on re-interpretations of his photos of the horizon. The wave-like forms rise up and sweep across the valley, drawing visitors out into the landscape. The overall effect is a vista of long, rolling seas.

Corinne Julius | Blueprint