How to Build a Mitate-mono (transformative upcycling) Japanese Garden (Part 2)
Where can you get mature plants and fabulous materials for nothing (or nearly) to build your dream garden?
Part 2 of an 8-part series on building a mitate mono Japanese garden.
Read Part 1 of How to Build a Mitate-mono (transformative upcycling) Japanese Garden.
In the last part I talked about how the idea of a mitate mono (a Japanese idea of highly elevated recycling) garden came to me. It was luck, but not an absence of design. I didn’t decide to build THE garden but A garden.
I had in mind I would try and find items to reuse and look for better solutions than buying expensive garden centre plants. That was enough of a starting point. It meant that when opportunity came along, I could respond to it. It arrived when I found Jim Dooley’s Japanese pagoda going in a skip. The idea of a vegetable garden was abandoned. Serendipity arrived many times and I am going to write about it in a later episode; it’s always a moment of decision. It will change things: Will it be for the better? We are now far into the project but it happened again the other day. I saw someone selling a huge plastic irrigation tank on Facebook for £30. I was too late for that. But in my message I told the person what I was doing.
They replied, did I want a 150mm thick slate slab, 2m long and 80cm. I think the best answer would have been ‘Is the Pope a Catholic.’ But I was too excited for any even halfway decent reply but ‘yes please.’ Now it will be the bridge over the stream. Which means what I had gathered for the bridge will get used in a different way. That is what happens in a project like this.
But this article is not about responding to opportunity. It is about making it. How did I get large numbers of people to give me items for this garden, or to sell them to me on the cheap? I did not have a magic solution. I learnt as I went along. Of course, I have done fundraising for years. That helped enormously. I knew already how to get people behind a project. I was not afraid to ask.
That does not mean I didn’t make mistakes. I made huge mistakes. Let’s talk about the biggest. I didn’t build a website at the start. Worse, I didn’t even build a Facebook page. Why not? Well, I naïvely didn’t think I would get that many people interested and I didn’t think about the effort I could save and how much more compelling the project would be with the right message and the right visuals. Stupidly I thought I could just tell people as I went along. You might think this is extraordinary. You might say ‘you were a professional fundraiser; how could you be so dumb?’ My defence is that I made the classic fundraiser mistake; I thought about the case and the ask, not the legacy. This happens on a grand scale sometimes. A fundraising campaign goes viral and no one knows what to do with all that money and all those donors. We all live with ‘Hope for success and plan for failure.’ We rarely plan for success let alone for exceeding expectations.
A few things happened because I did not plan. Firstly, I spent a lot of time rewriting messages. I would type a message on Freegle: I would love this, I am building a mitate mono garden blah blah blah. Next day, I would scrabble around, and copy and paste with some edits to someone else. I could have done a lot of leg-work with a webpage. But even a Facebook page would have given substance to the project, and it would have got shares and others would have supported. So I missed a trick not doing it sooner. Even if it had made no difference, it would have signalled intent, trust and gratitude. Fortunately, I have fixed that issue now. I also should have kept a proper log of all those who helped. It would have been two minutes each time. So maybe three hours work. Instead it took me a day later to reconstruct it off Freegle, Facebook and email. So my first takeaway is: be more organised. My second is to plan for success. I know this can work for anyone. I am not a charity. In a moment I am going to talk about how I showed public benefit. But a real charity has that on board before they start. Universities, schools, hospices… anyone with some land that could be landscaped would have a bigger audience and much more compelling case. So make the effort to build a simple website, Facebook page, Instagram. And at least keep an Excel spreadsheet.
When I started, I did not think, let’s make it mitate mono. I didn’t even know the term. At first, I just thought I would look on Freegle and see if anything came up. When it did, I thought let’s see what people are offering free on Facebook. And then I was 20 items in and thinking: this could work for pretty much everything.
At that point a few things came together. The big ones were opportunity and responsibility. Clearly, a lot of people would give me stuff. Clearly, I had to ensure that I repaid that through public benefit. So my case was built in part not as a justification to get a ‘yes’ but as a justification for asking. It was not right for me to deny someone else a plant, or a stone, or a pile of old bricks unless I was going to use them well.
This goes back to the website. If I had started with that, I would have thought it through. Instead, the first few gifts were met with a nod when I was asked if I would be opening it to the public. Then I started saying up front I would, for the Air Ambulance (who gave me a fabulous ride over the Brecon Beacons one night in 2022). Later, I realised the pagoda is a great venue for artists to show work during Art Week. It’s a place for small seminars of up to ten people that can tie into public discourse. It’s a place that can be an inspiration for other mitate mono projects.
And, of course, it’s somewhere for me to write and make art and I believe that those things can bring value to the lives of others too.
So as time went on, I had a case. And one day someone on Facebook said ‘you know this is called mitate mono in Japan’. So now I pretend I had it all in mind, from the start (though I am letting you in on the secret that I definitely did not).
So how did I go about getting stuff?
Almost all came from Freegle and Facebook. And huge amounts were given for free. The materials have cost a tenth of what it would have cost as Travis Perkins and Sarah Raven.
Freegle is, of course, free. I worked out everywhere I went fairly regularly. Down to my brother-in-law in South Wales. Over to kids in Oxfordshire. That meant that everything south, down to the Bristol Channel was within reach and all of the Midlands within M42, M40 and M4. So I signed up for all the Freegle places I could in those areas. And I started posting requests. Sometimes it was a post explaining the garden (see now how good a website would have been) and asking for anything that people thought might help. Sometimes it was more specific. For example, old oil drums that can be converted to contain bamboo. The bamboo barrier to make a container from new that size is £60 and it would have taken half the production of the North Sea for a month for the plastic. But an oil drum is just a bit of scrap.
I got many, many things. Old carpets to use as weed-suppressant. About 400 sq m from people doing up houses across Powys and Shropshire. Real weed stop from someone who used it to cover the polished concrete floors in her Passivhaus whilst they were finishing the build. Old oak beams, bricks, the sapele boarding off a dismantled garage, corrugated metal covered PIR that will form the walls of the extension to the pagoda at the rear (before being covered with locally sourced Douglas Fir boards, finished shou sugi ban). The list is endless and much is quite banal but vital. At least 20 pallets and 20 dumpy bags that have been used to help move the 60 tonnes of rock that was given to me.
When new items were given, I developed a simple stewardship programme: a Facebook group. It’s called The Welsh Marches Japanese Garden: Where the Whale Talks to the Stars. As I explained in Part 1, that name came from a stone given to me among 8 from Silverstone. It looks like a whale breaching.
This group was invaluable. It meant that when I responded to Freegle requests I could say ‘Look, be part of this.’ That mattered as it made no sense to agree to get 50 bricks from Worcester if I needed to drive 80 miles to collect them. So I needed to ask people to hold on to items and be flexible on collection. They were. If I had simply said ‘nice bricks, need them for the garden’ someone who could come the following day would have had them.
Facebook was similar, but more demanding. You may well be surprised to learn that a lot of things are offered free in Marketplace. I searched for them and took the same approach as Freegle. But I had to work harder to reassure. No-shows are common on Facebook and so people need significant reassurance I would come.
This is a story about something someone was selling, but it really proves the point because of how things turned out. I saw a fabulous clematis armandi… in Bournemouth. It had a great back story. It had grown up the whole of the house. The owners decided it was out of control and cut it down. They threw it on the compost. Two months later they found the stump had taken root there. Now it was a mass of shoots and rehomed in a huge tree. Armandi is evergreen, vigorous and Japanese. We had the perfect place for it. But I am not going to drive 350 miles to get a clematis. However, I had promised to take my son to Southampton for a university competition a month later. Not only did the lady agree to keep the plant once I had told her about the garden, she waived the £25 she wanted for it. I dropped him, an hour’s drive, get the plant, sandwich in the New Forest, collect son and home. So now I have a plant with a root ball like a dustbin, and in a couple of seasons it will be a plant simply impossible to buy from a garden centre.
This process, of contact and persuading people to wait was a pattern all this summer. I could not go to Wakefield for a mugo pine unless I also went the same day to Manchester for a Japanese laurel and then to Bolton for a pieris. So all had to be inspired by the garden and agree to wait until I could sort out the entire trip. It might be that you are thinking that, even then, that is a long way to go. It’s not. What this process did was achieve huge, mature plants that can only be obtained for thousands of pounds commercially. The mugo is probably a £5k plant. Getting plants like this has meant the garden will be in a complex, developed state at opening. It would have been impossible with my budget otherwise. More importantly, those plants, all destined to be destroyed for drives and extensions have a second chance. It would have been worth the trip just for that. Yet I couldn’t just leap in the car each time I heard of a plant, so I had to persuade people to wait.
Nothing was more logistically demanding than the rocks. I can’t move those things. I needed my gardener to do it. I could drive, and tell bad jokes, and carry the flask. He needed to shift. So that meant persuading people to be there on the day he happened to be working (no I don’t have a country estate and a gardener every day on call!). But we got 60 tonnes of rocks that way. Enough that the garden looks like a professionally built show garden, not a rockery.
An important element with Facebook was to also look in the same search area as Freegle for things for sale. I realised I would never get gifts for all of it. But I might well find items that were not expensive and that, if I told people what I was doing, people might cut the price. They did. There is a wonderful pine tree. A Polish man down near the Gower grew it in a crate, from a cone. It took 15 years. Then his grandchildren wanted a trampoline. He heard about the project and cut the price to £120, the price of the trampoline. That is another tree that would cost thousands if bought commercially. But let me be clear, that truly isn’t the point. He grew that from a cone. It now is pride of place in a wonderful garden. He can come and see it on open days. He knows it will be loved by me and admired by thousands. And I will remember the man who tended it to life every day I walk past its warm scent on a summer’s day or look at a dusting of snow in its branches.
My final strand was local Facebook groups. I posted regularly on every community page for 25 miles. One of those posts brought in a fabulous collection of rare bamboo. It brought slates, stones, a pond filter and more.
So here are a few more takeaways:
Join Freegle in all the places you might be able to reach.
Search the same area on Facebook.
Search things like Free, Plants Free, Stone Free etc. If paid-for things come up, see if they will take less.
Get them to wait by sharing the project, its benefits and the support you have had to date. People love to be part of something.
Engage local groups. People are now proud we are going to have a great new garden in our area, and proud how the community responded.
In the next part, I am going to look at how people have been thanked, and what I am doing going forward to maximise benefit and community engagement.
Read Part 3 of How to Build a Mitate-mono (transformative upcycling) Japanese Garden now.