M idori Shintani trained in horticulture and landscape architecture at Minami Kyushu University in Japan, then moved to Sweden in 2002 to work as a gardener at Millesgården and Rosendals Trädgård in Stockholm. She returned home in 2004 to a garden design company and a perennial nursery, and since 2008 has been head gardener of the Tokachi Millennium Forest in Hokkaido — a thousand-year conservation landscape on the wooded foothills of the central Hidaka mountains.
Her practice at Tokachi is grounded in shizendo, a way of reading where each part of a landscape sits on the scale between wildness and human hand, and tending it accordingly. A sabbatical at Great Dixter alongside Fergus Garrett deepened that thinking; the result, at Tokachi, is a garden that has become one of the clearest articulations of what a contemporary Japanese garden might look like in the early twenty-first century — Japanese horticultural sensibility meeting the wider naturalistic movement on its own terms.
With Dan Pearson, who masterplanned the site, she co-authored Tokachi Millennium Forest. She writes and lectures internationally, including for the New York Botanical Garden.
