-[Curtis Smith] We're in Denver at the innovative Japanese garden of
Richard and Eleanor Shorter. What caused
you to choose to do something like this?
To have a beautiful Japanese garden like
this?
-[Eleanor Shorter] Well we've always enjoyed the botanical gardens
and especially the
Japanese area of the garden.
So that was probably our most important impetus to
go ahead with this garden.
-[Curtis] What do you enjoy most about your garden?
-[Richard Shorter] We enjoy the opportunity, I guess to get away from everything.
When you go down there, it's
very quiet, you don't hear any road noise,
it's a very serene atmosphere, very calming, and enables us to unwind from the stresses of the day.
-[Eleanor] From watching the
fish, sitting on the bench and watching the fish,
of course feeding them.
We've got him eating out of our hands now.
-[Curtis] Richard, did you design this
yourself?
-[Richard] No. Keith Clark did the design as well as the construction of the garden.
-[Curtis] Can we go see Keith and talk to him about how he did this?
-[Richard] Feel free. He'd love to talk to you.
-[Curtis] Thank you very much.
Keith this is a beautiful garden you designed here.
-[Keith Clark] Thank you Curtis, I appreciate that.
-[Curtis] Wow, and how'd you learn to do something
like this?
-[Keith] Well, I actually studied landscape architecture in school, went to Japan for two weeks, and looked at
all types of gardens and different
locations. And I got a lot of experience
and just knowledge on how to put
textures and colors together.
-[Curtis] It's really nice. I like this bamboo wall. How did 
you build something like this?
-[Keith] Well this was a fascinating experiment that we
tried in Denver.
Actually brought the bamboo in from Georgia, had a cut sit in the warehouse for a year.
To actually come out--came in, attached to a concrete wall with two-by-four behind.
And as you notice, the string and things--it hides the screws that actually hold that bamboo to the wall itself.
-[Curtis] Can you show us how you've done it?
-[Keith] Absolutely.
-[Curtis] Let's go look at that.
-[Keith] Curtis, I'd like to show you exactly how we put this bamboo and attach it to the wall.
You notice there is a two-by-four behind.
-[Curtis] And that is attached to the wall itself?
-[Keith] That's correct. And we painted that black so as
you see the cracking in the bamboo,
between the spacing, you don't actually
see that white concrete shining out.
Each one of these bamboo pieces are
attached to that with a screw that you can see here,
and the twine is wrapped
over.
So as we construct this, we do one piece at a time, we screw it in, and then we take the twine and wrap them.
And we go
that whole process all the way around.
[music]
[hammer and screwdriver sounds]
-[Curtis] Looks like a lot of work.
-[Keith] It is a lot of work. It was literally almost two and a half weeks just to put the bamboo up itself.
-[Curtis] I notice a lot of interesting plants here. Can we talk
about the plants?
-[Keith] We sure can. Let's take a look.
-[Curtis] Okay. I see you've got Japanese
maple here in bamboo.
The bamboo I really didn't expect it all in Denver. But the Japanese maples looking good, it's not scorched.
-[Keith] Well Curtis, two things have
occurred.
We looked for a bamboo that was in the same tempered climate that would be in northern Japan.
In reference to Japanese maple and scorching in the winter--once a month we come out and do a
watering system for all the plant material here.
-[Curtis] In the winter?
-[Keith] In the winter, to make sure that that root system is well hydrated as it goes
through particularly the months of
January, February, and March.
And we get great growth coming in on--during the
season.
-[Curtis] Did you have problems taking care of this landscape?
-[Keith] Yes we did. There's
several problems we had.
Number one, the pond itself.
Because it's so flat down here, it's difficult to actually get the water to move from one pond to the next.
So the variance is in the stream itself.
And the filter that's down below will
actually suck that water from the upper pond
and float it down, then recirculates
back up again. and that was one of the
And that was one of the things that we had to really be careful when we were constructing the pond itself.
-[Curtis] Looks nice though.
Fish are happy.
-[Keith] Fish are happy.
There's a great filtering system in there. This also gets maintenance on it,
usually once or twice a month.
So that we keep the clarity of water.
And the fish just go from one pond to the next, down
that stream.
-[Curtis] Okay. And do you have climatic or microclimate problems here?
-[Keith] Yes we do. Everything that's on this face is basically north facing.
Everything against the building is south-facing.
And we had to make a really--a change in the type of plant material
and how we maintain that and how we install that.
-[Curtis] So you turned it to your advantage.
-[Keith] Exactly, absolutely to our advantage.
-[Curtis] So where a microclimate should be used then.
-[Keith] Exactly. Also, we try to choose the
colorations and the variances in that rock
to give us that Japanese feel, as close as possible, so it meshed with the rest of the garden.
-[Curtis] Great. Thank you for showing us what you have done here.
-[Keith] Absolutely. Curtis, it has been an absolute pleasure.
[Japanese music]