World in a Walnut: Zen garden and forest

After Owl Forest my hands were itching to make something in micro scale again. The elegance of zen gardens really appeals to me and the idea had been in my head for a while. I have no specific knowledge of zen gardens (or gardening in general 🤐), so it is more about the inspiration than a realistic execution. It gives me great satisfaction to create a beautiful landscape with the smallest details. To build up a composition with different structures and colour differences, of course without using paint. I have chosen a combination of a garden, with a circular pattern in the white gravel around the stacked stones, vegetation along the edge and a transition to a forest as a background. The bamboo grows from the garden towards the forest and the Torii gate marks the transition to the forest behind it. I have used a multitude of leaf structures and colour shades, to emphasize the variety of the plants. Normally the walnut is too small to incorporate my logo anywhere without disrupting the scene, but now I saw an opportunity to put it on the Torii gate 😊.

This time I chose to make the walnut without a hinge connection. This walnut cannot be closed, the plants grow out of it. This creates a nice connection between the halves, which have literally grown together. It took some puzzling to get this done in a way that it would remain stable enough to bake, that was a bit stressful 😅. But after some fiddling with aluminum foil for a while, I succeeded. After baking, I finished the black stacked stones with a gloss varnish. This makes it stand out even more clearly as a decorative element and it is more visible that the stones also have lines, which makes it more natural.

Want to see the other “World in a Walnut” projects? Click on: World in a walnut: Camping, World in a walnut: Crystal Cave and World in a walnut: Pagoda and Cherryblossom.

The scene is made of Fimo (polymer clay) in a walnut shell. The dimensions of the whole thing are 5.6 x 4.4 x 5.5 cm (H x W x D). The base was printed by my partner with black PLA filament. In previous projects we noticed how slippery walnuts are and therefore, difficult to ensure that it remains stable on the base. That is why we have now tackled it a bit more high tech. He first used the scanning app poly.cam to scan the walnut:

and then, using the design program Fusion 360 to create a base that follows the shapes of this walnut with precision.

The project took about two months (started in late 03-2025 and completed in 05-2025).