About

Lunar Raven Hub started in the autumn of 2019 in a rented house in Portland, Oregon, where Keiko Ashford had a back garden that was, by any honest measure, a mess. She had grown up watching her grandmother tend a small tsubo-niwa courtyard garden in Kyoto, and after twenty years working in graphic design in the Pacific Northwest, she found herself wanting to rebuild something of that quietness. She bought a juniper from a local nursery, read everything she could find in English and Japanese, killed the juniper, bought another one, and slowly began to understand what the work actually required.

The site began as a personal notebook, a place to record what she was learning about bonsai soil ratios, about the difference between Japanese black pine and shimpaku juniper in a Pacific Northwest winter, about the way tsukimi is practiced differently in Kansai and Kanto. Friends started asking to read it. By early 2021 she had added a small shop, sourcing tools and materials from a family-run supplier in the Pacific Northwest and a ceramics studio in New Mexico that fires in the Oribe tradition. The shop has stayed deliberately small: she adds new items only when she has used them herself for at least one full season.

Today Lunar Raven Hub serves readers and gardeners across the United States who are drawn to Japanese aesthetic traditions but do not always have access to specialist knowledge or materials in their area. The articles are written by Keiko and occasionally by two contributing writers she has worked with for several years. The shop carries around forty items at any one time. Consultations are booked a few weeks out. The pace is intentional.