Energised by spring’s return, I’m starting to plan the hatake for 2025 and beyond. Having been told that monkeys, boars, and deer are likely to eat any vegetables I might plant, I am pivoting to my interest in botanical color. I will create a color garden that produces plants I can turn into dyes and pigments.
I already have some plants in mind: indigo, roselle, and cosmos have all been fun to play with and I havre easy access to them. There are other options, too, both native and foreign so I started looking through online sources. It’s bewildering. Finding the right plants for my exact conditions is not easy.
Feeling a bit overwhelmed by the choices – and tired of slowly reading through my Japanese sources – I turned to my bilingual friends, Claude.ai and ChatGPT, and asked their advice. They gave me overlapping information but not exactly the same. It was like talking to two experts with different opinions.
My target list now includes:
- Reds & Pinks
- Akane/Madder (茜) Rubia tinctorum
- Roselle (ロゼル) Hibiscus sabdariffa
- Blues
- Ai/Indigo (藍) Persicaria tinctoria
- Aobana/Dayflower (青花) Commelina communis
- Purple
- Shikon/Purple Gromwell (紫根) Lithospermum erythrorhizon
- Yellows & Oranges
- Akizakura/Cosmos (秋桜) Coreopsis tinctoria
- Benibana/Safflower (紅花) Carthamus tinctorius
- Kuchinashi/Gardenia (クチナシ) Gardenia jasminoides
- Kariyasu (刈安) Miscanthus tinctorius
I will include companion plants of comfrey, chrysanthemum, shiso, mugwort, yarrow, fennel, basil, mint, and marigold. Maybe a few potatoes, too. I am going to cram them in there! I will also draw on the plants that already exist in the garden and orchard. We really do have an abundance here.
I’d love to design the garden as a meditation labyrinth where you walk a complicated path from the entrance to the center, but the garden plot isn’t quite large enough. So I simplified the idea and made an informal version of a formal garden. Though it’s not a labyrinth, it will be a lovely place to walk your own pattern.
You can see it has a stone marking the center and short paths radiating out to a border path, defining four unevenly sized quarters. There’s room on the outside for planting, too. The north side (on the left in this photo) borders the old road and there’s lots of turmeric which I want to keep there.
I planned for the west side to be wide enough to bring the hammer knife mower through, so even when summer growth goes wild and takes over, we’ll still have a clear path. That meant rethinking my witch’s garden, but since the the mints are well-established (they are already greening up) and I have space for lots of companion plants in the main garden, I am not so worried about maintaining a separate herb garden.
I have full sun on half the plot, and varying amounts of shade on the other half. There’s a mulberry tree on one side; bamboo on the other. It’s a slope with mixed drainage. We’re likely to have another drought this summer. Making a planting diagram took some time, but I think I got it:
ChatGPT and Claude also devised planting diagrams for me, but they don’t know my space as well as I do.
Anyway, that’s my hopeful and enthusiastic plan for the garden. I will update as I go. Will it look okay in July and August?
