How to Build a Mitate-mono (transformative upcycling) Japanese Garden (Part 4)

Projects don’t go off the rails: they are like fighter planes and F1; inherently unstable, always out of control. You have to steer… all the time.

Part 4 of an 8-part series on building a mitate mono Japanese garden.

Start with Part 1 of How to Build a Mitate-mono (transformative upcycling) Japanese Garden here.

Jump to Part 2 or Part 3 if you missed it.

This is Part IV of the story of building Where the Whale Talks to the Stars, a Japanese-inspired garden made mostly from found plants, rocks, and hubris.

The garden continues. We are not quite at this stage… but soon. Photo Cody Weaver

In the first three parts of this series, I have talked about how the garden started, where I found materials and plants for free or next to nothing, and how I thanked people.

I have painted a picture of a journey to Shangri-La. By now I am expecting that you have the lawn up, there are 50 tonnes of rock on the drive, and half a dozen 20ft pine trees (or maybe I am judging you by my incautious approach to life).

The deck will be put in around the stone, and a border of gravel between rock and wood. With this and the other rock (see last photo) we will create the impression the pagoda has been built on an outcrop.

Whatever, I am hoping you are now so inculcated into my mitate cult that I can let you in on a dark secret: it wasn’t plain sailing… Oh, you knew that? Well, thank you for indulging me.

Let’s start with a stark fact. Gardens are not made of earth. They are made of mud. Heaven smiled this summer by not adding the ingredient required for this Damascene conversion (rain) in any quantity for months. Week after week went by with hot sun and zero irrigation.

One man’s meat is another man’s poison. I had plants everywhere, dug and replanted in pots that needed almost ceaseless watering. That the garden has a well would have been invaluable… if we had started by hooking up a system for moving the water from the well to the garden. But we didn’t.

And so the plants ended up on driveways where watering was easier. Given how big the pots were, and the number, they then remained there all summer. It did mean they could be watched.

Of course, the process of watering went horribly wrong in some cases. Sometimes we missed a plant. Sometimes we overwatered. Like most projects, it became increasingly reactive. When a couple of plants flagged from too much water, I bought an electronic sensor and checked each pot and watered accordingly. £15 from Amazon.

Why didn’t I start with this? You don’t know what you don’t know, I guess. Watering plants: it can’t be that hard, can it?

But the extraordinary thing is that most plants survived the long hot summer. Which fared the worst? The huge shrubs we had ripped from the earth out of the way of bulldozers? No, it was some azaleas bought in pots in a special offer from a garden centre. That shouldn’t be.

But it indicates why garden centres expect 10% losses. They do not take the care we did all summer, and we nursed plants through what all the garden books say should not survive: too big to move, wrong time of the year, stuck into pots, etc. Makes me feel less bad that I didn’t buy the meter sooner. We managed OK. Just could have been even better.

The tree was removed from a garden just outside Newtown. It at about 1000ft there and the ground was impacted slate. It took some digging. And then a lot of tlc. But its doing fine and being planted next week.

Of course, the weather did not stay dry forever. I told Justin that we must ensure that all heavy work was done before the end of August. The last thing we needed was to move heavy rocks in the rain.

So the last thing we have done is move heavy rocks in the rain. 50 tonnes, maybe more. A lot did get shifted by August. But various important personal matters intervened. So the very biggest rocks got moved last month in an homage to the Somme.

That might not have mattered, had it been a site with access for heavy machinery. It was not. This is where I am going to briefly (I promise) explain some things I have learnt about loads.

I assumed that a small digger, the sort that could get through a narrow access of about 1m, could easily lift a rock. It cannot. The weight limit varies between models, but close to the machine, with the arm not extended, the limits are generally 150kg to 400kg.

150kg is not a very big rock at all. It’s 6 bags of cement or so. Pile up six bags and you will see, given how much more solid it is, a rock of 150kg is small.

400kg sounds a lot. It’s about the size of a washing machine. We had around 20 rocks bigger than that. Besides this, even smaller ones are unmanageable if one extends the arm.

Glacial boulders from near Llandrindod Wells. The biggest ones are about 750kg.

So even if we had found someone who could hire a small enough machine to get it on site with the maximum payload, a large number of the rocks would have been beyond it totally and many more would have only got somewhere close; final positioning would still have been manual.

How did it get solved? Well, first of all a neighbour’s wall came down. A pallet truck was found for £50 on Facebook. Pallets were acquired from Freegle. A very large ex-lorry engine hoist came from Bristol for £75.

Hoist stone onto pallet. Lift pallet with the pallet truck. Get pallet truck to near the site. Lift off stone with engine hoist.

I am sure you will have spotted the schoolboy error in this. How does the pallet truck get moved up a garden over soil, up slopes, through mud?

That is where a series of old wardrobe sides provided a firm base, and a 2 tonne winch off eBay provided the impetus. Each stone proceeded with less grace than Neolithic man moved the stones for Stonehenge.

You may also ask how the stones then got from the engine hoist into place. Some Justin levered with a picking bar. Some were pulled with the hoist, the engine hoist being lowered at the same time so it could be swung across. Then levering to set them just right.

I have discovered something very, very annoying about stones. They only have one way to be placed. You can put them down and they don’t look right and you move them and they don’t look right. You can do this ten times.

Then a tiny adjustment and they look as if they have been in that place for a thousand, maybe a million years.

Justin has bought a new suit for his wedding. His waist is even narrower, his chest is 4 inches bigger than when he started the summer. He was athletic already; now he looks like a bronze of a Greek warrior. More clothed, however, thankfully.

As you can imagine, when it turned wet, this became impossible. It is a recipe for an amputation or worse to move rocks like this if they are slippery.

Did the kit last? The engine hoist is going strong. The winch is great… except that it’s the third one as the lugs pulled off the last two… thank you winch company for replacing free of charge.

The pallet truck carried on for some time. But then it didn’t. It wouldn’t go up or down. Seals were changed, but to no avail. It is, sadly, just worn out.

But Facebook and a nice bloke near Leominster supplied another, much better one for £100. It’s now no longer needed and we will sell that and the hoist shortly, so actually, like the cement mixer which trundles on, we will end up with very little plant cost at all. The winch may have to go to a museum…

The bridge came from a garden being dismantled in Nottingham. It’s solid concrete and steel reinforcement and made to be walked over.

Over the period we have had a lot of fun. I have been the driver on a few collections. We went and got two huge rhododendrons. The root ball on each is about half a tonne. They got lifted on by several blokes working on the couple’s house.

There was already an oil tank (designated to be the header for the irrigation system… yes finally we are making the well work) and a 2m by 1m 150mm slate slab that is to be the bridge.

This was all too much for the trailer, which was terribly badly balanced. It was only a few miles down some of the most deserted roads in Europe to the garden. But about half a mile down, the trailer came off.

No damage, but Justin single-handedly manhandled all the stuff around and made it balance properly. After that it stayed on. And, as previously reported, now Justin needs a bigger suit.

I have left the biggest disaster until last. The pagoda is to be my studio. So I need a loo. And so we put in a four-inch pipe all the way across the site in preparation.

Did we fully think through the path of this pipe? Not well enough. So now the dry river has a pipe at one side, hanging in free air, like a gas line running across the Arctic tundra.

On Monday, a new trench, four 45-degree turns and a rodding eye will go in and it will be hidden from view. It’s one of those things. Better planning and it wouldn’t have happened. On the other hand, as a project like this goes, it’s a small mistake.

There have been other issues. Like when a large rock was lowered onto the decking outside the pagoda, and landed on the floor. That is what happens when someone forgets to put the screws into the joist hanger.

There was the cutting of the hose with a spade.

There will be more.

The takeaway from this episode is this:

Take safety seriously if you do a project like this. These are items that will crush a limb, sever fingers, break a skull if you trip. Think through how to do things first. Take it slowly and carefully.

Most of all, remember, when you are smiling that there is no rain and all the rocks are moving around with ease, someone at dusk is going to have to water a couple of hundred plants.

Next time I am going to talk about serendipity: why the plans for a garden like this, like an order of battle, only survive the first five minutes of engagement.

Unlike a battle, however, it’s been the most enormous pleasure to have to constantly adapt. There has not been an adaptation that has been unwelcome, or that has not turned out far better than what we first intended.

Thanks for reading!

Read Part 5 of How to Build a Mitate-mono (transformative upcycling) Japanese Garden now.