"All worries and troubles have gone from my breast and I play joyfully far from the world." Muso Soseki, Japanese Zen master and poet, surely could have penned those words thousands of years ago for Lake Forest gardeners and nature revelers John and Emiko Lake. John, a long term Daphne city councilman, and his visionary wife, Emiko, combine their male and female strengths and energies to fashion a garden playground that enhances their home as well as their neighborhood. On the whole, their garden draws bold contrasts between the serene peacefulness of Emiko's Zen sand garden in the front yard and the delicious practicality of healthy herbs and vegetables that John touts out back.

In many gardens, we may find clear pathways and neatly manicured plants and rows of vegetables. While we do find some of that at the Lakes', Emiko draws upon her visionary ideas to create unique frames of reality for their garden. Though not formally trained in a garden curriculum, Emiko follows through on her visions, providing the physical labor, along with John, to create the harmonious simplicity of her Zen garden and raised vegetable and herb beds along with conceiving original hardscape ideas for the backyard.

When the Lakes purchased their house three years ago, they knew that it would take both good ideas and hard work to build the dream home that they both envisioned. After repainting the entire house, inside and out, they have begun to transform the yard into the tranquil landscape of their dreams.

By the front porch, Emiko has painstakingly removed twelve inches of dirt by hand and added white sand that she has raked into a wavy pattern, symbolic of water, to form the Zen garden foundation. Onto this, she has added a carefully chosen rock or two, a young maple tree, and a few flowering plants. This simple garden, so unlike our color-filled sensory-exploding beds, is meant to display a starkness that invites us to gently contemplate, apart from the hectic life of this world, our true essential natures. This garden can help us discover, through quiet meditation on these basic elements from Mother Earth, the source and strength of our humanity and direct our lives with more simple poise and composure.

John and Emiko find it very rewarding to transform their garden themselves rather than hiring workers to do it. Both share a firm, practical philosophy of recycling everything that they can, and there are many examples of this throughout their garden. The dirt that Emiko removed for the Zen garden, is recycled for use in the raised beds of the vegetable garden. All the yard's leaves are raked into piles, added to existing soil, and, tempered with patience, are turned into nutrient-dense compost welcomed by all of the plants. Rain barrels capture rain for free to water the lush garden. Emiko re-purposes plants that John considers weeds into a cough-suppressing tea and uses stalks from a bamboo patch as stakes for the towering tomatoes. Together, John and Emiko are constructing a water-retention pond and waterfall to help channel the run-off water in hilly Lake Forest through their yard. John laughingly shares that, as Emiko dug the fairly deep trench for the fountain, she asked him to lay in it--his "grave", he calls it-to determine if it was deep enough. Rocks and tree stumps are painstakingly dug out, scraped, and washed and used as garden stools or plant stands among the garden beds.

This innovative and creative gardening couple both have a history of gardening practices learned in the gardens of parents and grandparents. Emiko's mother, in Okinawa, grew a garden after World War II to feed her family of nine children. Emiko learned from her mother valuable gardening practices and gained knowledge of using creatively the plants that are available. When John was growing up in West Virginia, his uncle was his gardening partner, purchasing the plants such as pole beans, peppers, and tomatoes for the young fellow to grow. He has continued to garden, patio-style, throughout his life.

Vegetables that Emiko and John lovingly nurture in their raised beds include nice-looking tomatoes, lettuces, spinach, avocados, eggplants, radishes, cucumbers and spreading sweet potatoes. A trellis forms an arbor for the fresh-forming scuppernong grapes while a verdant strawberry patch, started from a single plant, spreads through the backyard. Other fruits that the couple grows include pomegranates and figs. The herb garden includes the traditional rosemary and thyme, but also includes a purple Japanese mint which Emiko uses to season seaweed and spaghetti and to make pickles. John snipped a requested clipping of mint from Helen Keller's garden when visiting there and enjoys the profusion of minty flavor it continues to produce today.

Emiko is the chef in this family. "She cooks while I just burn," John explains. She loves to use anything fresh from the garden and often invents accommodating recipes. A flavorful recipe for "Poor Man's Lunch" includes fresh radish leaves combined with bouillon stock, Ramen noodles, and a poached egg. John does share his great grandmother's recipe for using crushed eggshells soaked in water as a garden compost and bug repellant.

Urns grace the front porch, that sixty years ago, served as decorative shipping vessels for olives imported from Greece to John's aunt. Everything that is found or comes their way is refurbished and reused in a creatively refreshing manner.

Unpretentious, living simply, recycling what is taken from the land, this joyous couple fashions a home and garden by envisioning new ways to arrange Mother Nature's bounty. The simple elements of sand, soil, rock, grasses and trees find new expression in their hands. Perhaps we can all learn from them the beautiful art of simplicity in our gardening and so find that the rest of our world has become simpler for a time as well.