~ Recycled Landscaping ~

How to turn a nasty barn ruin into a beautiful karesansui (dry rock) Zen garden.

When our century old barn became too too dangerous to use anymore we had a salvage company remove as much of the old board and beams as possible.


It's nice to think our old board will have a new life as an upscale floor someplace, but we were left with a terrible mess of crumbling granite foundation walls and splintered waste board.

This is how we changed an eyesore into a place every visitor wants to see. It required lots of our labour but not much cost or new material as we reused almost everything to make our Zen garden literally rise from the ashes.

Please enjoy this instructable and don't forget to rate it and comment on how I can make it (or the garden) better. I am happy to answer any questions you might have.

Pretty self explanatory. The wood salvage company left a substantial pile of rubble that had to be buried or burned.

All the metal we found in the pile was sent to a scrap dealer. The road repair crew owed us a favour for helping them out so they used a huge loader to rough level the interior after the clean out and then we got started.

The clean up was the hardest step. It took a long time and an intense amount of labour. It didn't cost much but it was hard work.


Don't be too quick to bury and tear down everything, you may find a few treasures like the large granite rocks under the floor and the mature grape vine growing over an old door frame. Reuse it to save money and recycle as much as possible...

Working one section at a time, we pushed over the granite foundation walls to make them safe and hand piled the rocks to show off the best colours and give the garden it's shape. (Yup, that's me on the backhoe... it helps to have a strong friend around the farm)

Make sure your final wall heights are pleasing before you start adding plants, or you will have to be like me and take down the high bits by hand later. We originally thought leaving one high wall section would be a nice contrast but it was too distracting from the rest of the garden, so, out with the sledge hammer and up on the wall to get it done...

All of the rocks taken down by hand were used on the other garden walls.

Draw some paper plans of how you want the garden to look when finished and use them as your guide. A garden hose helps to show you how to shape and space your garden elements. You can't stick to the plans too rigidly on a project like this because you never know what you might find in the ground or exactly how a wall might fall etc. Nature tells you how the garden will ultimately look, you can't force it overly much.

Keeping in mind that different heights make an interesting landscape, we used some large rocks we had left over from a retaining wall project and they made excellent stair steps and benches inside the garden.

Your tractor is your friend on this type of job, but make sure you work safely and never put anything you can't afford to lose under a suspended one ton rock, including toes, tools and old pet dogs that don't move too quickly anymore!


Now get a few loads of drainage stone and stone screenings to use as walkways and decoration around your rocks. Put lots of landscape fabric under the walkways and screenings to prevent weeds from coming through.

Build a section at a time and work in some proportionately sized flower beds as you go. Not too many or you will lose the Zen-garden look. There are lots of rules around how to correctly build Japanese karesansui gardens if you are a purest, we followed some of them but mainly we just wanted something to look clean and well proportioned.

The flower beds were excavated to about 3' deep and refilled with top soil and compost we made ourselves. Almost all the plants we used came from our other gardens, we did buy some of the trees from a local nursery and traded some vines with our neighbours.

Every Zen Garden needs some eye catchers. You make these from interesting shaped stones and plants and arrange them to suit your taste.

We were lucky to have found three very heavy granite rocks under the floor of the old barn and we wrestled them into a grouping that we surrounded with screenings raked into a circular pattern to simulate waves on the lake. (I made the rake out of a few salvaged boards nailed together with a 1" wide sawtooth pattern cut out)

When we started this project, most of the neigbours thought we were nuts and suggested we just push everything into a hole and grass it over.

We wanted to recognize the work the last generation put into this structure and try to make it beautiful for another generation, so we decided to recycle the granite and also the iron flywheel from a wind powered straw chopping machine that came with the barn.

We cut the 100 lb. flywheel off the ugly old chopper and welded a couple legs to it. We planted the wheel in a flower bed and it makes a perfect yin/yang and a great conversation piece.

Our lazy black cat loves this garden and has made it his own personal ninja chipmunk training school. (The chipmunks get a lot of hard lessons from the master)

Notice the mature grape vine over the old door frame in front of the silo. We carefully saved that piece of the barn wall and the vine through all the demolition and reconstruction. It pays us back every fall with the greatest bright reds and gold colours and makes a perfect visual high point all year long.

A finished Zen-garden for visitors to enjoy for another generation thanks to recycling the materials left for us by the last generation.


Now if only we could figure out a way to recycle those weeds!