Stories
The installations in the gallery don't arrive finished. These are the rescapes, redos and first attempts from the Hakkai team along the way — logged as they happened.
Hakkai's Forest Tank came apart and went back together over several days, with teammate Pascal leading the redesign on the 45U in Hakkai's own gallery space. A forest scape lives or dies on how the hardscape reads before a single plant goes in — the early passes show the wood skeleton going up, then the layers of planting filling around it as the days go on.
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After more than two years running, Hakkai's Dutch-style display got a full refresh — new soil, a new plant palette chosen by teammate Steven, and higher CO2 to push growth through the terraces. Dutch tanks are gardens more than scenes, and a redo means starting the rows over from bare substrate.
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A first build from a new team member: a bonsai-shaped hardscape piece dressed in anubias and set into a 2.2-gallon curved-glass tank, with a low carpet of dwarf hair grass and pearlweed filling in around the base. Small tanks forgive nothing — every leaf placement shows — which makes them one of the best ways to learn.
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A primer on the technique Takashi Amano popularized: plants and moss worked into a ball or mat of substrate, wetted, wrapped, and set to root before it ever touches water — a faster, more portable alternative to planting bundle by bundle with tweezers. Hakkai runs a hands-on workshop building the substrate balls from scratch, the same process shown here.
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A live setup demo at Hakkai, built by a teammate on a UNS 16T — a tall-format nano that trades footprint for vertical scale. The tank kept getting posted and updated over the following weeks as planting filled in, a good reminder that a scape's first day and its finished state rarely look alike.
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A fresh trim on the long-running Lower Otay aquascape, posted alongside a comparison shot from over a year earlier. Most aquascapes on this site are shown finished — this one is a reminder that a nature aquarium is never really done. It's maintained, trimmed, and re-shaped for years after the first planting.
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A compact take on iwagumi's strict rules: two stones instead of the traditional odd-numbered arrangement, black mountain seiryu stone, and a sloped substrate for depth, all inside a 2-gallon UNS 20C. Two hair grass varieties were planted front and back specifically to compare how each grew in over time — a small, deliberate experiment inside a small tank.
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