Osamu & Holly Shimizu: Nature Lovers

Nurturing a garden that is a marriage of two very different styles.

By Marion Butterworth

Photographer Omar Salinas

I’m going to kill it,” declares Holly Shimizu decisively, but with obvious regret.

“I love it, but it’s too invasive. It is an evergreen akebia (Akebia quinata) vine originally from Asia, also known as chocolate vine, that has smothered its support and threatens to take over the tiny terrace bed.

Hers is a practical “take no prisoners” approach to gardening. “I’ll plant another native there. I want to grow what grows well,” she explains. And as the years tick by, what grows well where shifts as trees mature and shrubs expand in middle age.

A garden is a dynamic place where there’s “continual evolution” according to Holly. “We try to take our lessons from nature,” she says.

Nature’s bounty is, in large part, the reason that she and her husband Osamu, a landscape designer and a native of Japan, love their Glen Echo home tucked among streets that are named after top-tier universities. “We’re close to the river. We love the neighborhood and its history. It has a small town feeling,” says Holly.

Home is a 100-year-old cottage reconfigured for 21st-century living. The Shimizu’s residence here testifies that this community, almost without a vestige of its original Chautauqua inhabitants, still attracts an eclectic mix of interesting people.

East Meets West

So how did the son of a Japanese rice farmer and a girl from tiny Chestnut Hill, Pa. come to wed and weed together? They met in a garden, of course.

Raised in Okayama, Japan, Osamu sharpened his pruning skills on the family shrubs. After earning a degree in landscape design, he began his career working in design firms in Japan. Eager to expand his horizons, he embarked on a foray into foreign lands that led to jobs in some of the top gardens and nurseries in Europe, including the Arboretum Kalmthout in Belgium and Kew and Wisley in England.

Holly attended Penn State and Temple University Ambler College, graduating with a degree in horticultural design. While in college she interned at Longwood Gardens, her first exposure to public horticulture. There was also a summer stint at Potomac Garden Center. After earning a Master of Science in horticulture from the University of Maryland, Holly set out on her own journey, which eventually begot the union of two gardeners from opposite sides of the world. How’s that for cross-pollination?

In Europe, she worked for three years at the Hillier Arboretum in Romsey, England and later at other of the world’s most famous gardens in Belgium, Holland, and Germany. As fate would have it, she and Osamu had jobs at the Arboretum Kalmthout at the same time.

Now they share a life made richer by two children, Alexa, 19, and Bevan, 22, and a patch of land on which they cultivate a garden that synthesizes their two opposing styles and differing horticultural interests.

The Lure of Water Music

Upon entering their quarter-acre lot, the chuckle of falling water seduces the senses, tugging feet toward it in almost unconscious movement. Yet the Potomac River is still more than a stone’s throw away. Captivated as soon as the gate in the white picket fence swings shut, visitors set off in search of the source of the sound.

The sunny front lawn, no wider than the one-lane bridge on MacArthur Boulevard, would go practically unnoticed were it not for the contrast of the chunky stone blocks that clutch the edges of the slightly raised foundation beds. Each has a repeating diamond pattern of diagonally planted square stepping stones. “My front garden is one of the few places I have plenty of sun so I can grow herbs. They are fantastic edging plants, because their foliage falls and billows gracefully over the edges of the beds and walkways,” says Holly.

Curator of the herb garden at the National Arboretum for eight years, Holly admits to an enduring love affair with herbs. At home she expanded her sunny growing space by installing a rooftop garden for herbs and vegetables. Its water collection and unique watering system reduces the number of times a week that she has to tend it.

“I like to garden for all the senses,” she explains. “Lemon silver thyme, lavender, and savory are my favorite fragrances. Whenever I cut them back, I bring in the harvests for use in the kitchen.”

An Unfolding, Japanese Style

Lured past the front beds by water music, the garden unfolds like origami in reverse. An arch formed by the tangle of clamoring akebia vine, a spruce, a vertically pruned American boxwood, and a weeping blue Atlas cedar frames a glimpse of what lies beyond. The cedar alludes to what can be heard but not yet seen, with its twisted branches that spill downwards like water over a fall.

Through the enclosure, in a small glade shaded by magnolia, cedar, and redbud trees, a three-tier fountain trickles into a low, moss-covered bowl. Birds come to bathe in the top tier, lending birdsong to the soft splashing, this duet a soothing afternoon lullaby.

“We bought the fountain about 20 years ago. The basin was just the right size for the spot,” explains Holly. “We can hear the sound of water through our bedroom window.”

Terraced Treasures

A garden is a journey where the paths and walkways usher visitors along like gracious hostesses. From the fountain sanctuary, wide brick and stone steps lead to a cloistered, green pocket in the distance over which a barely discernable statue presides. Small, fragrant plants slow the pace, bidding closer inspection with their unusual textures and forms.

Holly and Osamu transformed this once grassy slope into a nursery of rare and native shade lovers. There are royal and painted ferns, hellebores, golden striated lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis ‘striata’), winter daphne (Daphne odora), foam flower (Tiarella cordifolia), tree peonies, native pachysandra (Pachysandra procumbens), toad lilies (Tricyrtis), and Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla), a close relative of forget-me-not.

Holly stops reverentially in front of a rare sacred lily (Rohdea japonica ‘Godai Takane’). She’s a bit chagrined to admit that she paid $75 for this evergreen perennial, although it’s worth it each fall when it bears clusters of brilliant red-orange fruit that contrast beautifully with its deep-green, strap-like leaves.

Shade-loving herbs grow here, including leadwort (plumbago), ragwort (Senecio aureus), and native jack-in-the-pulpits (Arisaema triphyllum). Holly advises planting ginger (Asarum canadense) close to paths to better admire the unusual brownish-red tubular flowers hidden under its leaves. Pausing at the sweet woodruff (‘Galium odoratum’), she explains with obvious affection that, when it dries, it smells like newly mown hay. “Gardening with herbs in the shade can be an excellent retreat from the sun,” she adds.

This part of the garden enjoys shade from paper bark maple, fragrant snowbell (Styrax obassia), red buckeye (Aesculus pavia), horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum), Japanese zelkova (Zelkova serrata), flowering Japanese apricot (Prunus mume), and cherry (Prunus serrulata) trees, some of which Holly rescued from the trash at the National Aboretum.

“I asked my boss if I could have some trees that were on the rubbish pile. I planted some here and some around town,” she says with great satisfaction.

The steps end on a natural landing at the entrance to a circular garden dominated by a porcelain Buddha, the spongy moss carpeting a fitting stage for the serene entreaty implied by Buddha’s outstretched arms.

“We keep grafting bits of moss here and there to fill in gaps,” says Holly. “We’re not big on grass. It won’t grow here anyway.”

Water Works

Raising her voice over the sound of tumbling water, she pushes open a six-foot-tall lattice-topped door left enticingly ajar to reveal a composed yet animated example of her husband’s art. Cascading water and the twittering song of finches and sparrows mask the noise of street-side traffic.

Osamu, owner of Shimizu Landscape Corporation, designed the Asian Valley garden at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond and a Japanese rooftop meditation garden at Mount Holyoke College, along with numerous gardens at private residences in the D.C. Metro area. All of his designs incorporate the principles of repetition, balance, and rhythm, executed with a simplicity and control indicative of his Japanese heritage.

He brings this same minimalist aesthetic to his own 30 x 50 foot backyard bower where stone dominates, reflecting the Japanese reverence for age. In what started as barren, flat space covered in scrubby grass and surrounded by chain link fence, the Shimizus built a sloping water garden, beginning at the bottom by digging out the pool.

To create the changes in elevation needed for the rhythm and movement of the waterfall and stream, they mounded up rocks and covered them with dirt excavated from the pool area. Water, pushed by the pool pump up to the top through a 70-foot pipe hidden by plants and rock, babbles in the brook across the “mountain,” and then chortles its way down into a collecting pool where the children used to play. From there it flows in a narrow six-foot stream, finally tumbling over a flagstone shelf in a sheet, rippling the surface of the 16 x 26 foot black-bottomed pool.

Paving around the pool is an irregular mosaic of black pebbled areas interspersed with broken slate. “The paving is part of the garden’s texture, rhythm and movement,” explains Holly.

Osamu chose plants and trees to complement the water and stone. A carefully pruned weeping katsura cascades to one side like falling water. “In fall its brilliant orange leaves are sweet smelling. People describe the scent like sugar, cotton candy, molasses, or strawberry jam,” says Holly. Osmau chose to plant the Japanese maples, leather leaf mahonia (mahonia bealei), and assortment of meticulously shaped pines in this part of the garden as much for their architectural forms as their stunning autumnal color.

The Shimizus ascribe to the Japanese practice of shakkei, or borrowed scenery, enjoying their neighbors’ American elms and Pawpaw trees with their long, drooping, dark green leaves that turn gold and brown during the fall.

A two-sided deck surrounds the interior living space, a bridge between inside and out. If they’re not in the garden, the Shimizus are watching the play of light on the water from their deck and observing nature.

In the fall, Osamu doesn’t tidy up the flaming maple leaves that fall and float in the water. He and Holly enjoy the kaleidoscope of shape and color that etches the pool’s surface in autumn’s slanting light. This swirling senescence composes the garden’s seasonal swan song.

“When the kids were young, we didn’t have to go to the park. We had one right here,” says Holly. “Having a garden like this changes your life.”

Recently certified by the National Wildlife Federation as a National Wildlife Habitat, the garden “feels like a sanctuary,” she says. “The key to better living is to make where you live the place of your dreams.”