The Giverny of Japan.(Yasunori Tochi designs garden inspired by Monet paintings)

Wearing high boots, Yasunori Tochi wades into his pond of waterlilies to pick out fallen leaves. The floating flowers, pink and white, are surrounded by yellow and blue irises; on the shore, a willow tree sways in the breeze. The bucolic scene looks, well, like a painting--a Monet, to be precise. That's no coincidence. Tochi has been re-creating the impressionist's famous Giverny pond in his rice fields on the tiny Japanese island of Nomi, south of Hiroshima in Japan's Inland Sea. Monet was influenced by Japanese prints, calligraphy and paintings. But could the artist ever have imagined such a passionate Japanese fan? "If Monsieur Monet were alive, I would want him to enjoy a cup of green tea and paint my waterlilies," Tochi says.

Turning terraced rice fields into a garden is no easy feat. Over the past 10 years, Tochi, a 62-year-old Town Assembly member in Okimicho (population: 4,000) who also tends a fishing-tool shop, has spent every spare minute working on the project. To plot it out, he bought several books on Monet's gardens and studied the designs. He began digging the pond first by hand, then later purchased a mini excavator. He scoured catalogs for waterlily bulbs and visited different towns to collect water weeds. So far, he has built an atelier and a 500-square-meter pond. On one recent morning he was contemplating how to design the rest of the garden using the existing cherry, bamboo, plum and gingko trees. "I want to have a wisteria trellis and more willow trees around the pond," he says. "And I will be building a Japanese bridge soon, just like the one in Monet's garden."

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