When we first moved to this house, the garden had a lovely view over the lake, but this was slightly spoilt by a rather ugly chainlink fence with concrete posts. Since we do not own this fence, we did not have the option to remove it and so I decided to mask it with a substantial bamboo fence in a traditional Japanese style.
From visits to Kyoto and reminded by the illustrations in Isao Yoshikawa's book Building Bamboo Fences, I chose a ryōanji-gaki style which was originally built as a partition in the precincts of the Ryōanji Temple (although my version would need to be a little higher to hide the concrete posts). This style has a thick top rail or moulding (tamabuchi) made with 3 pieces of split bamboo, and there is a bottom rail (oshibuchi) of similar thickness. The fretwork (kumiko) was traditionally made from stout bamboo split into slats and arranged in a diamond pattern, but I decided to use whole pieces of thinner bamboo as seen in the example at Shiba Detached Palace, Tokyo, below.
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