Garden plans

It is no secret that I'm excited for spring, and this year I'm even looking forward to spring a little bit more because of my big yard. Our yard at our new house is a big plain square of grass, just hoping to be planted. E and I decided a long time ago that we want to have an Asian garden in our backyard, and when we returned from Japan we even planned it out. The plans became a little more concrete after Christmas, because I gave E a Zen Garden book, and it was full of awesome ideas. We sketched the yard on paper and started drawing our ideas. I wanted a bench where I could enjoy tea. E wanted a dry river. Soon our paper was full of plans, and come warm spring weather we are going to begin.

Last Saturday I dragged E to one of my favorite garden stores here in Utah and we had a wonderful time looking at bamboo and weeping pines. Afterwards we headed to another store I'd seen in passing called Cast In Stone. I've been desperately wanting a stone lantern for the garden but couldn't come close to affording one made of real stone. Cast In Stone sells garden items all cast from concrete, and their "stone" lanterns were beautiful! They also had a sitting Buddha that E loved. We decided to purchase both (coming from a garden fund where we've been putting all of our extra savings into) and can't wait to pick them up.

Here is our garden plan/map as it stands now. Things might change, but we've been pretty happy with this plan for awhile. As you can see, our wish list is quite long, but we hope to be able to start this year, and work in phases.
And here are some of the images that inspired our own Asian garden in the first place-