Contact us: Email: littlekyotogarden@gmail.com (224) 435-9273
Serving North parts of Chicago, Evanston, Winnetka, Northbrook, Aurora, Naperville, Schaumburg
Spring is coming soon! Is your garden ready for the new blooms or it needs a clean-up after the winter?
Call us for a Spring Clean-Up now!
224-435-9273
Little Kyoto will help you remove the old growth - last year's leaves, annuals, fallen branches, garbage blown in your garden. We will also refresh your shrubs and little trees with pruning and shaping.
About Little Kyoto
Little Kyoto is the brain child of Kate G that offers the wholistic combined benefit of Japanese design, European practicality offering specialized maintenance and garden development. The Japanese concept of developing plant shapes and maturity at the same time -and for the same cost as the maintenance program over time, improves the overall sustainable beauty of your landscape, within your budget, adding maturity while creating and supporting personalized dream gardens, or public spaces with service specialties.
Principles of the Japanese gardens I have studied, worked-in and photographed are reflected in my work and projects. Creating low-maintenance perennial beds, selecting evergreen trees and bushes that give colour to the garden in the long winter with plants that bring beauty throughout different seasons through their shapes, blossoms or color-changing leaves. Water features, such as small fountains (chozubachi in Japan), waterfalls or ponds, stepping stones and paths can also be created around and through the inspiring shapes in your garden landscape..
Pruning and trimming by hand preserves the natural beauty of your selected plants by developing shapes that create special places that fosters your environment for your needs. Developing a pruning and care plan that guides the plants future to suit a design also keeps plants healthier by developing stronger sustainable plants.
Details matter - I pride myself on attention to details so that each plant is looking beautiful individually as well as the entire space after each visit.
Japanese gardens are my passion and I love designing and building them for you.
Japanese gardens have many forms and meanings. Overall, they create emotions and feelings as everyone responds as the gardener has intended in the design and planned maintenance. Gardens here are the same as gardens in Japan. The colder the climate, the higher the ratio of evergreens, with the balance enhanced with seasonal beauty accents such as cherry blossoms or bright autumn colors of Japanese maples. Some gardens have lively waterfalls with bubbling babbling brooks that laugh or gurgle, or - quiet soothing ponds of leisurely swimming koi fish flashing and flickering between colorful lilies and green pads. Dry gardens (sekitei) are both indoors and out, made by skillfully arranging stones that communicate ideas, set in gravel patterns that have been used for hundreds of years.
Water is used to suggest cleansing, leaving one's cares at the entrance before entering homes or special places. Popular useful shapes are washing basins, curb wells, coming in many shapes and arrangements for different purposes from washing vegetables to attracting birds. Water, as a design inclusion brings movement as well as melody in every seemingly motionless garden. The added benefit of providing a sense of cool humid clean space adds to the charm when ferns and deep shade flowering plants are added.
Sekitei, 'stone-only' garden spaces, often mislabelled as Zen gardens can be as simple as a single stone in patterned gravel. The patterns are unlimited, and while each have meanings, the overall purpose is to create feelings, that visually offer soothing low-demand environments for restoring the spirit. Maintaining their cleanliness, as they are ideal propagation areas, is a specialty I offer, along with raking different patterns custom designed delivered weekly or monthly when supported by your meditative raking as your mediation.
Entrances in Japan need to be multi-functional and are great at making an entrance and applying the simple ideas here, where we are just beginning to feel the pinch for space and usefulness. Entrances, are the public invitation to your house, benefiting from extra detailing and care, while giving the right messages for approaching the home.
Ponds often are part of the Japanese gardens, as they are here, yet the shapes of the water surface is beautifully developed to offer a soothing flat level space in which to reflect and recharge oneself. The water surface with the added stone, limited to selected locations, adds depth and deep color to reflect the surrounding garden, blending plants with water that connects you to your refined nature. Ideal for photo-ops and occasions.
In an opening consultation we can browse my gallery of Japanese gardens to select the details, ideas, & concepts that work for your life-style, what is best for you, your space, your entrance and how you and your visitors wish to feel.
Services:
Maintenance, garden renovations and redesign, pruning and trimming, clean-ups
Seasonal planters, plant arrangements, holiday decorations, and interior plants or arrangements for your home and office.
Garden Photography for your garden as documentation or for beauty shots can be arranged, and are also available for other professional landscapers, architects, landscape architects, and real estate companies for their portfolio's or sales needs.
Here are some examples of my local works throughout the years.
A cascade of flowers
Colorful summer
Abundance of blossoms
Summer joy
Holidays planters
It's Christmas
Holidays raised bed
Xmas decoration
Planters can change your entrance from a simple door to a warm invitational embracing moment.
Each season offers varieties of options as plant materials, color combinations, and special accents are constantly changing in availability.
Before and after gallery of small recent clean-up and maintenance jobs
This backyard garden was overgrown with weeds, looking unsightly and abandoned.
After the clean-up it was again functional and attractive.
The weeds had grown over the gravel areas, between the pavers and over the plants.
Clean, manageable and beautiful again!
Little Kyoto also offers personalized planters designed with the refined taste of an ikebana practitioner. All 4 seasons and for any other occasion. We can make arrangements in existing planters or do full installation.
My previous experience as a landscaper in America, after Japan, includes planting and maintenance of public spaces in Chicago such as Grant park, Lincoln Park, Humboldt Park, Navy pier and many other locations in Chicago. Here are some of the stunning examples of care and maintenance that I was part of.
Lincoln Park
Great Garden
Congress Median
East Ida B. Wells Drive
Lincoln Park
Grandmother's Garden
Navy Pier
Navy Pier
Roosevelt Median
About me:
My name is Ekaterina, Kate for short. I lived in Kyoto, Japan, for 12 years and I fell in love with the Japanese gardens. I had a chance to do an internship in a famous Japanese landscaping company, Ueyakato Landscaping, based in Kyoto that has built and is tending some of the best, notable gardens in the Kyoto.
When I moved to Chicago in 2017 I started working in landscaping for private residential landscape companies and high level - high finish public places around Chicago. A gardeners gardener with an eye for framing perfection with attention to detail.
My company Little Kyoto came to life naturally as my photographic eye, training in arrangement (ikebana), combined my dream for making Japanese gardens that adapts the beauty of plants with beautiful landscapes using established management traditions that Japanese gardeners have kept growing throughout time.
Landscaping and gardening is a collaborative labour of love and I will be happy to meet with you and hear about your dream garden, finding workable solutions to improve your garden and as needed, help you create it.
Starting your garden journey simply takes a phone call, an email, or connecting on social media. Kate
Serving North parts of Chicago, Evanston, Winnetka, Northbrook, Aurora, Naperville, Schaumburg
Phone: (224) 435-9273
Email: littlekyotogarden@gmail.com
