How to Build a Mitate-mono (transformative upcycling) Japanese Garden (Part 1)

or the non-brochure, bad, but beautiful (and to a budget) briefing.

The Pagoda that started it all. Justin Lloyd, my amazing gardener and I wonder what we have taken on

I am building a mitate-mono (見立て物) garden. This term is a lot more than fancy upcycling. In a wonderfully linguistic way, mono, which means things, also means lots of different types of things. It can be prosaic, but also deeply spiritual. It can be object and essence. And mitate means to transform to a new and greater form.

So you can see how mitate-mono has potential for anything from using an old bit of pipe to be the handrail of a graceful bridge, to conferring status on an object so that it becomes something of veneration.

In my garden, it’s both, and everything in between. And that means this is both a field report and philosophical journey. I have discovered my way through a glib, partial and impossibly limited understanding of Japanese aesthetics. I have considered my way through a less glib view of how this could be a garden that doesn’t appropriate but is a dialogue between the ancient understandings of place in Japanese and Celtic cultures… and I have worked out how to use a pipe for a handrail on a bridge.

These fantastic rocks, some now forming islands in the dry stream, were donated by a lovely couple in Mid-Wales

At the moment, I have also worked out that I need to do a series to explain, without it being too long winded, what making such a garden involves and what it means, personally and to the community. How do you find stuff? How do you ask people to donate things and thank them for it? In a garden like this, how much is plan and how much must be done on the hoof, the garden having its own ideas about how it will be? Related to this, I need to talk about serendipity. Things come up if you ask people to donate stuff. You need to be nimble thinking to work out how plans can be shifted to maximise these benefits.

Because we wanted to test out ideas, the artist (my son Elliot) worked in colour, but he aimed to make a gesture to the great ink wash artists like Sesshū Tōyō

Then there is more abstract, metaphysical stuff to discuss. Japanese gardens (and actually more Western gardens than we give them credit) operate on symbolism. Placement of stones, paths, plants all will ‘say’ something. How does one make it coherent; better still, multifaceted? This discussion will lead us back to serendipity because some of the items that arrived gave a steer to how we could create meaning.

Then I need to talk about purpose, which might be a strange place to move on to, rather than to start from. But when it comes to opportunity, if you build in such a way, you will find that not only ‘will they come to you’; if you build you will come to them. You realise potential and potential beckons. So I want to talk about how it has evolved to a social, collaborative and reflective space.

If you go to www.johnruxburton.co.uk/garden You will see that over 100 people are donors or supporters to the project. That’s amazing. Such faith is humbling.

It’s a responsibility and it’s a lot of work and a lot of thought. “The buckets with the biggest stones are the lightest ones to carry.” is true of big rocks because they don’t fit like a bucket of pebbles. It’s true in life too. So I want to talk about the wider experience and lessons of this project.

Artists Impression - Elliot Rux-Burton

All this I will come to. Let me tell you for now how this project started. And let me tell you of one or two highlights I think you will enjoy in the weeks ahead.

I have a property with a long garden. Too long really for garden use and two decades ago it was a vegetable patch. Then I rented the place out, the old guy there (my dad) couldn’t tend to it and it got over-grown. He moved out as he needed more care and I got a gardener to tidy it a couple of times a year.

I am a novelist, poet and fine-art photographer. You can find out more about what I do at . I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff. So I wanted a good place to do it. The answer was obvious, get the gardener to reinstate the veg patch. Build a shed. Call it a Cider House (I am an artist, so I absolutely must have a pretentious but beguiling down-to-earth name) and use that as a studio.

But it didn’t quite work out that way. As we go through this series, you will find I use the expression tobi-ishi (飛石) a lot. It means stepping stones and a principle in a Japanese garden is that these stones are not placed evenly but in a way to ensure the visitor steps to the right point to observe the view and then move to the next.

Life is full of many tobi-ishi and, ironically, it was real tobi-ishi that started this journey. I saw on ebay someone selling some Japanese stepping stones. Beautiful, irregular, large 80x60 some of them, slabs of black slate. Jim Dooley, of The Dooleys, had imported them to build a Japanese Garden. Well, that is what I found out a bit later, anyway.

They were for sale at £125 and I thought I could buy three (ridiculously expensive, but so lovely) for the little courtyard at my home. You see stones like this are several hundred pounds each. However, when I dug into the ad, I realised it was 19 of them, ALL for £125. So I hit buy-it-now and then relaxed over a coffee trying to work out how on earth I would shift a couple of tonnes of slabs more than 130 miles.

When I got there with able assistance, I discovered that the new owners of Jim’s place were reconstructing the garden and all the Japanese stuff was going. I noticed an amazing pagoda.

The Pagoda is slotted together

When I say amazing, I don’t mean amazing, I mean amazing. What was (and is) incredible is that is the joinery is so precise and so crafted, it is not nailed, but slotted together. It was clear to me this was not a British shed. This had come from a master carpenter in Japan.

I asked their plan for it. I was shown the awaiting skip. So I gave them another £125 and that become the subject of rescue a week later. It sailed down the M4 on a car trailer. The arched roofs of the five sided building were stacked up, so it looked as if a load of viking long ships had been piled up for transport. There were some surprised looks from passing cars.

It was put up at the top of the veg patch, and the places for onion sets and spuds and cauli all thought through. And as we thought it through, a bonkers idea came to me. Forgo the veg, Aldi sells that. But Aldi doesn’t sell niwake pruned pines, and sweeping acers and towering bamboo. And this building needed to be cherished with the company of such things. It was all very well to salvage it. But I could not make of it a shed, just as I could not have turned a 19th-century Man o’ War into a hulk.

So I started to plan how I could build a Japanese garden. I was utterly clueless and I can tell you then, and throughout, I made a lot of mistakes. And I had some happy errors that turned out better than expected.

My first mistake was to think the project possible. Sir Tim Smit at a conference once said to me ‘I am not a visionary. Everyone has ideas, many greater than the Eden Project. The difference is I had an idea and I didn’t see why I couldn’t make it happen.

Looking back now, I realise part of that ‘vision’ for me was being too stupid to see how impossible it was. On this basis the true visionary is maybe someone with very little vision at all and a reckless conviction it will ‘be alright on the night’.

But I had great luck too. I saw some Japanese antique garden ornaments. Not Japanese at all, actually. British Japonaiserie of the first half of the 20th C. I bought them and then did some research. One was Ryūjin (龍神) the Japanese sea-god with his temple on his back.

Ryūjin (龍神) garden ornament

You could tell it wasn’t Japanese as one set of feet were three-clawed, the other five. Chinese and Japanese hedge-betting by the maker. And this is where chance can become triumph. Around the same time, I saw someone offering some huge stones for free on facebook. I took my poor gardener there to move them. Nearly killed him. The biggest was easily one tonne. I should not have taken it on: too far (over in the Midlands, too big, too heavy. Mad).

But one stone was extraordinary. It looked like a whale.

The Whale

And there it was: Sea-god and Whale. The idea that the garden would symbolise the sea was born. It has come to symbolise much more. I will tell you about that in later posts.

So this will be a story of how not to build a garden. No catalogue. No blank cheque. Most of the garden has been donated (look at and you will find over 100 people in our roll of honour, donors and supporters). It wasn’t properly planned, it was adapted. It’s been organic, as is maybe appropriate.

The seven ‘stars’ that came from Northamptonshire from kind couple who also gave us the Whale

But it won’t really be a story of a garden. It will be a story of people and their lives. Like David who grew an Acer from a sapling until it was 14ft high and 18ft wide. Then buyers of his house said they would cut it down to widen the drive. So we dug it up and moved it and now it is an acer grove, and somehow, maybe just on love, it has survived. Every plant, every stone has a human story.

An Acer, moved from Neath, from the path of a new drive

And that’s where it comes to you.

Comment.

Tell me the mitate in your lives. Not just plants, but your life, how it got upcycled for the better. But tell me about the things and plants that got upcycled too. Tell me about your garden, what it means to you. Tell me if you have plants or things for the Welsh Marches Japanese Garden: Where the Whale Talks to the Stars. It has a Facebook group. Ask and I can send you an invite. Tell me about serendipity and how you did the stupidest thing that somehow, wonderfully, worked.

Me behind a huge bamboo given by a couple in Hereford

Mitate-mono, in this garden, means taking things from an old life — beams, stones, ornaments, plants — and letting them become something else entirely. A new life. A second, better chance.

I hope the story of the garden will inspire many to see they can do the same.

as they begin to rise again
Chrysanthemums faintly smell
after the flooding rain
Matsuo Bashō 1644-1694

Read Part 2 of How to Build a Mitate-mono (transformative upcycling) Japanese Garden.