Terrace Project : Japanese Garden Tsuboniwa Karesensui

Ok, ok, I know, "garden" might not be the right word for what happens to be just a square of 1.5m of side length... But I really wanted to have a small Tsuboniwa Karesensui, what you usually call a "dry garden" or "zen garden".

Nothing very fancy about the construction. Just some 3x2" wood pieces spared from the building of the two decks (loggia and lounge), cut to the right dimensions and screwed together... Just a small detail I hadn't planned, a small notch was necessary for the frame to fit perfectly against the fence. Nothing a jigsaw and a chisel can't fix in a matter of minutes though... The frame is covered with two layers of wood surface coating. The goal is not only to protect the wood, but as well giving it a color as close as possible to the two decks and the boardwalk surrounding it.

Once the frame was in place, I stapled on it a geotextile fabric to cover the bottom part. The objective is that the weight of the gravels that will come over it will help flattening it to the ground. Without it, since the tiles of my terrace aren't perfectly flat, I would have had gravels sneaking between the tiles/ground and the frame...
About the gravels, it's very important to rince them with lots and lots of water before you put them in place, since in their container bags they produce huge amounts of fine stone dust by rubbing against each other. And that dust would then dirty the rest of the terrace at the first rain... So, here it is, the non-final result.
The above pictures should be seen as "work in progress", the overall setup being just a first test.
Later on, there should be a granit stones Buddhist triad, a river made of black slate flakes, and perhaps a "turtle island" covered with moss... The piece of drift wood on the pictures above was reclaimed on a beach near my place the day after a big storm. I know it has nothing to do with Japanese traditions, but I like it anyway.
To be continued, evolution will come next spring!