VAL BOURNE visits a garden in Japan that is very English

It's high summer. The cuckoo's calling and the first roses are just beginning to break away from the buds, releasing their familiar soapy fragrance. The morning sun is already warm and the sky wears the soft, milky haze of midsummer.

It could be a scene from any British garden, but I'm in Japan at the Barakura English Garden in Nagano prefecture. It's a four-hour drive northwards from smog-laden Tokyo, up towards the mountains that hosted the Winter Olympics of 1998.

Every year the Barakura English Garden hold a festival. It's in its 16th year and I've been to lecture and demonstrate about organic principles, something the Japanese people aspire to.

The garden is owned by the Yamada family and their four-day festival, modelled on the Chelsea Flower Show, attracts 20,000 visitors. They mostly arrive in coaches and drool over the roses and the soft, cottage garden planting which differs so much from the restrained gardens of traditional Japan.

Even the gardeners, Andy and James, are English and we also have a Scottish piper, two fish-and-chip shop owners, crafts, porcelain, magicians and musicians, all flown in from Britain.

I'm lecturing with Peter Beales the classic rose grower, Jim Keeling, of Whichford Pottery, and Susie Edwards, the flower arranger.

I've seen the Barakura gardening style before because Kay Yamada has designed and built two Chelsea Show Gardens. The most recent, in 2003, recreated a Japanese meadow and the show garden has been rebuilt in the depths of Barakura.

Here cicadas, not London sparrows, chirrup merrily in the trees above. The Barakura climate is more extreme than ours. Winter temperatures can dip down to -18C, but roses survive well usually under a cover of snow.

Summers tend to be hotter and more humid than ours, but expansive ramblers like Kiftsgate' and Paul's Himalayan Musk' thrive here.

Although Japan has also suffered a late, cold winter and the roses were ten days later than usual.

The crisp Sander's White' is another popular rose with its rich-green leaves and neat white flowers. The Rugosa roses, which hail from Japan, thrived too, as you would expect, and there were Albas, Portlands and Gallicas looking healthy and about to flower prolifically.

The Japanese have taken to growing classic English roses with true passion and they flocked to Peter Beales's lectures.

Japanese gardeners also love demure, nodding clematis and pale honeysuckles.

We grow many Japanese plants in our own gardens. At Barakura were hosta, hydrangea, rodgersia, wisteria, lily, hemerocallis, iris, bog primula, astilbe, Solomon's Seal (polygonatum), viburnum, indigophera and peony, all looking supremely happy here in their native land.

Although I can only muster a word or two of Japanese, the oohs and aahs of admiration crossed the language barrier and the generations in this little bit of England in the Orient.

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