T okachi Millennium Forest is Dan Pearson and Midori Shintani’s account of one of the most ambitious naturalistic landscape projects in the world — a thousand-year forest garden in Hokkaido designed to be walked, watched and quietly inhabited across the slow rhythms of a Japanese year.
The brief is unusual: a working forest, a meadow that performs across long seasons, and a series of garden rooms held inside it — all built to last a millennium. The site sits at the foot of the Hidaka mountains on Japan’s northern island, and the design is shaped throughout by the Japanese tradition of shinrin-yoku, forest bathing — being among trees not as an activity but as an act of attention.
The book is a collaboration between Dan Pearson, the British designer who has shaped the project from its first plans, and Midori Shintani, head gardener at Tokachi Millennium Forest since 2008. Between them they tell the story of how a working landscape becomes a garden — and how a garden built at landscape scale can still feel like a place to lose yourself in.
A masterclass in naturalistic planting.
— Annie Gatti, Gardens Illustrated
The critical reception placed the project at the centre of the contemporary naturalistic conversation. House & Garden’s Clare Foster called it “a new strand of naturalistic, sustainable gardening that could be used as a model for garden design worldwide.” The Spectator’s Ursula Buchan singled out Pearson as one of the finest British garden designers — “blessed with sensitivity, a wonderful eye, deep plant knowledge.”
Tokachi Millennium Forest — Pioneering a new way of gardening with nature — is published by Filbert Press.
