ON the Maintenance of Home Gardens in Tokyo

Abstract

I used a questionnaire to survey residents of homes in Setagaya, Tokyo to determine actual and desirable levels of maintenance for home gardens-particularly trees, shrubs and lawns. Results showed that 21.4% of respondents were satisfied, but 41.8% were not satisfied with current maintenance levels. Averages for desired levels of annual maintenance were: weeding 57.4 times, cleaning 127.4 times, applying of fertilizer 3.0 times, insect and disease control 3.5 times, and pruning of trees 3.4 times. However, ideas of desirable maintenance cost varied widely from family to family, so I couldn't obtain useful average figures for this; subjectively while 64.8% of respondents said that they “wanted to increase maintenance to a satisfactory level, but didn't want to pay more than they are presently paying”, 35.2% said that they “couldn't keep up with it” or “hadn't considered it”, and 22.0% said that they “didn't want to pay for it”, so this survey showed the difficulty of achieving desirable levels of garden maintenance.