A garden of native perennials funded by Dai-ichi Life will be built at the expo site

• The single winner of ‘The Garden of Life’, a special category of the 37th Green Environment Plan Award, is “LIFE LINE: three gardens tracing the unseen connections that support life” by Team LIFE LINE (PICNIC garden design / MOTe). It will be built inside the GREEN×EXPO 2027 site. The English title is our translation.
• The plan divides the space into three gardens, for birth, growth and succession, and uses mainly perennials native to Japan to show the change of seasons. It also tries out resource recycling such as “bio-nests”.
• Members of the public, the theatre company Switch Soken and landscaping firms will tend the garden, sharing the work of “growing a garden” through maintenance and theatre. The judges singled out this way of working.
• The special category funds up to 25 million yen for building the garden and maintaining it during the expo. It drew 14 entries; the award as a whole drew 57.
• The category was created because Dai-ichi Life’s 125th anniversary falls in 2027, the year of the expo. The award itself was founded in 1990 on the ideas of that year’s International Garden and Greenery Exposition in Osaka.
• The garden’s location within the site, its size and the theatre schedule have not been announced.

Our take

This award was born in 1990, the year of the International Garden and Greenery Exposition at Tsurumi Ryokuchi in Osaka. Thirty-six years later it is putting a garden into the next international horticultural expo.

What stands out in the winning plan is less what will be planted than how the garden will be looked after. Perennials stay in the ground from one year to the next, so unlike a bedding display that is replanted to stay in full bloom, the garden shows everything from new shoots to fading flowers. Members of the public and a theatre company will work on it through the expo, and there will be performances. We think the same garden will look very different on the opening day of 19 March and the closing day of 26 September.

The funding cap of 25 million yen is two and a half times that of the regular symbol garden category (10 million yen per plan), but that alone does not tell us how big the garden will be, and the location, size and performance dates have not been announced.

Tips for visitors

• If you are thinking of going twice in different seasons, check the ticket types first in our ticket guide.
• Pages 2 to 10 of Dai-ichi Life’s announcement (PDF, Japanese) list the other winners of this award and of the Green City Award and Greening Technology Competition, with their locations in Japan.