Sentei-ya Sora has joined the SATOYAMA Initiative Promotion Network. The reason is a bamboo slope in Mie Prefecture where 31 young trees took hold, and a question we could not answer alone.

In a Meiji era garden in Mie Prefecture, there is a stone rimmed hollow shaped like a pond that was never meant to hold water. In June 2026, nearly 200mm of rain filled it, and it drained in under a day.

A toxic plant resembling giant hogweed turned up on a Hokkaido University campus in 2025. Here's what makes this carrot-family plant so dangerous — and why its flower looks so much like the carrot on your dinner plate.

On a bamboo slope in Mie Prefecture, we opened a shigara brushwood terrace we had built and found woodlice, earthworms and springtails already living inside. Two metres away, in the bamboo soil itself, almost nothing. Here is why.

Old satoyama trees near shrines and villages were never cut down by superstition alone. Suzanne Simard's 1997 mycorrhizal network research shows why the old-timers were right — and what it means for the way we treat old trees in gardens today.

Three years of regular care at a 120-year-old Japanese garden in Yokkaichi — from compacted, lifeless soil to a documented recovery, an 83% improvement in soil hardness, and the first bloom of a rare albino cherry sucker.