Why I think Brooklyn Needs a Japanese-Style Garden Shop

Anyone have Martha Stewart's number?

All photos via the Youtube channel GREEN_Tour

I always say that if I ever win the lottery (which might be difficult since I don’t play it) I’d open up a garden center of some kind. Exactly which kind always varies according to where I live and what I’m into at the time. Mostly I just want to open the kind of store that I want to go to: a store that doesn’t exist, but should.

We have some pretty good plant shops here in Brooklyn, but do you know what I think we could really use? A Japanese-style city garden center. I haven’t been to Japan (unless you count the airport—Tokyo-Narita struck me as so cool and wonderfully modern when I went there in 2003 that I think it kind of does count) but I have seen dozens of nurseries and garden centers around Japan, thanks to the Youtube garden algorithm. The channel GREEN Tour in particular has introduced me to lots of Japanese garden centers, and I don’t even need to understand the language to know that these are definitely the kinds of shops that would be a hit here in Brooklyn.

The Aesthetic

A once very trendy houseplant store called The Sill just closed its Cobble Hill shop here in Brooklyn. It had a very 2010s millennial kind of aesthetic (think shiny green plants in shiny white pots) but if you go to the company’s Instagram page now things look a lot different: more flower and garden content, fewer minimalist interiors. Nearby—and also in Cobble Hill—self-described “country store” The Six Bells sells ruffled floral pillows and English pottery. Just a few blocks away in Brooklyn Heights is Salter House, where you can find all sorts of pretty things, like Marie Antoinette-inspired nightdresses and silk bun-covers, but also some very practical French Gardana clogs. Oh—and did I mention that the Atlantic Avenue Urban Outfitters just got replaced by an Anthropologie?

Times are weird, and I think a lot of people are just gravitating towards pretty things right now. Plant nurseries here can be simple and utilitarian, but the ones I see in Japan look so escapist and lovely, sometimes designed to look like cottage gardens in England or like sunny French courtyards. The colors are soothing—the colors of the walls and statuary and garden furniture, but mostly of the plants: lots of pastels and interesting shades that I don’t usually see here. You know how the seed companies are always coming out with flower varieties in the prettiest colors, but then you go to the nursery to pick out a plant and basically have a choice between red and purple and white and Barbie pink? In Japan I don’t think you’d have that problem at all, because what is that pale pink nemesia-thing in the photo above?

I have a feeling that once I venture out further into Connecticut or into upstate New York I’ll probably find some garden centers that are aesthetically very similar. I know they exist around the country, but maybe mostly in the country, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to have something so pastorally escapist in the middle of Brooklyn?

The Plants

Because I’ve never been to Japan and because I can’t really find any information on these specific types of nurseries online I know I’m making a lot of assumptions in this post. For instance I’m assuming that most of these garden centers are located in big cities like Tokyo, but they could be in the country for all I know. But I do like this theory I’ve convinced myself of that these garden centers are specifically geared towards small-space urban growers like myself.

Even in Brooklyn the larger plant nurseries have a suburban feel to them, selling trees and shrubs and huge planters. This makes sense, I guess—their biggest customers are most likely brownstone owners with backyards that they want to fill up with low-maintenance plants. Fair enough. But the perennials at these nurseries can be kind of super-sized, too, and I balk at the idea of getting, say, a nepeta that’s going to take up all the space in one of my precious large pots.

But at these Japanese garden centers I’m seeing rows and rows of tiny plants in tiny pots, and I’d like to think that they’re being sold so small with the city gardener in mind. I mean, I’d much rather buy an assortment of little plants than something that’s already grown too large for a container garden. So much more fun. Not to mention cheaper.

The plant varieties, too are very different, at least from the varieties sold at the plant nurseries here. I especially love the selection of flowers for containers. Yes, there are violas and pansies, but they’re the prettiest violas and pansies I’ve ever seen. They make me want to go on a spending spree at Three Brothers Blooms’ Spring sale next month and grow all of mine from seed, because the violas and pansies I find around here are pretty boring in comparison.

And then there are the container plants that are really hard to find at nurseries here—the nemesias I already mentioned, bacopa and alyssum in pretty colors. Lots of plants I don’t recognize, all in tiny sizes. But now that I think of it, there might be another reason why so many of thee container plants are being sold so small.

The Pre-Potted Arrangements

I call them arrangements, because some of these planters, after being very densely potted up with these miniature plants, do end up looking like something you’d see in a good flower shop. When I first saw them I wondered how the plants could thrive while packed in so tightly together, but I don’t know if thriving is the point. I don’t look at a window box in Brooklyn Heights and worry about a hellebore’s fate, squeezed into a winter-themed planting. The window box is an ephemeral thing, and so are these planters. Maybe the plants are taken out and repotted once the whole combination begins to fade?

Mostly I love the idea of these arrangements because they’re like mini cottage gardens in themselves, easy to keep out on a balcony or terrace or even fire escape. A city dweller with no gardening experience or supplies or room in which to store bags of soil can take home to their apartment something so lovely and thoughtfully planted: an instant tiny garden that’s probably prettier than the brownstone gardens around it.

This year I’m growing so many container type plants that I think I need to try making one of these planter arrangements for myself. Fortunately another YouTube channel and (I think?) Japanese garden store GARDENS_LIFE has some good tutorial videos available (this is where understanding Japanese would be useful, but the videos do seem pretty self-explanatory).

My dream Japanese-inspired garden shop is a tiny one—I’d want it to be located on a good street in Brooklyn, after all, and there’s only so much space to be had here. City stores often have little courtyards in back, and I think that should do the trick, especially since the stock would be changing all of the time. I mean, you know that the ruffled pansies are going to be flying off the shelves!

Now, I realize that I’ve been describing Brooklyn garden centers as completely boring and absent of all beauty, which isn’t fair or true. There are some stores here that I love, including Boerum Hill’s GRDN (they have a back courtyard, and it’s filled with lovely plants from Beds and Borders as well as gorgeous pots from Bergs and Ben Wolff. Terrain—at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden—doesn’t have a lot of plants outside, but inside you can find the fanciest of imported garden tools as well as their own pre-potted arrangements, currently planted with forced bulbs. Gowanus Nursery sounds like it may have come closest to my dream Brooklyn garden center; unfortunately it closed before I moved here, but every so often they still hold pop-up sales. Last year I went to one called “The Littles,” where they sold tiny plants in tiny pots. So smart!

All of these places are great and fun to go to and spend money at (believe me, I know), but I still do think that Brooklyn could use a garden center like the ones in Japan. A shop that’s beautiful and escapist, a shop that makes you feel like you’re in the country. I think I know just the neighborhood for it. After all, if Cobble Hill can have a country store, surely it needs a country garden store, too?