How to Build a Mitate-mono (transformative upcycling) Japanese Garden (Part 5)

Serendipity, luck and how, in the end, Nature decides

Part 5 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 or Part 4 if you missed any of them.

The Whale is having a chilly time right now

It was the most incredible serendipity that this project ever happened in the first place.

Nearly two years ago, I woke up about half six. I could not get back to sleep. I started scrolling eBay for some bits and pieces for the work we were doing on our house. There were some Japanese stepping stones. They looked nice. So I bought them buy-it-now.

They were cheap, and they were for sale in Berkshire. I don’t suppose they would have stayed available for long. They had been put on late the night before. I was lucky I saw them. Indeed, as they were so cheap, the owners might well have simply stuck them in a skip. People so often do as they feel the hassle of dealing with a buyer isn’t worth a few quid. If I hadn’t bought those stones, I would have not seen the pagoda there, and that was definitely going in skip.

How different would my life have been? I would have done the garden anyway, but not in this way. I had planned a vegetable patch. Justin, my gardener, had even put in a couple of raised beds in preparation. I was going to find a shed and make it look like an old cider house: Plant a couple of apple trees, grow some lettuce and tomatoes and have a nice studio; a nice traditional and useful space. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.

However, it would have been far from the amazing journey I now look back on, or the adventures still to come. I would not have met so many new friends. I would not have shown what a community can do. I would have built something prosaic, not a poetic work of art.

Such is the oddity of life. Good fortune, and occasional disaster have followed.

By far the worst disaster occurred the day we went to fetch the big Acer from Neath. We got the huge tree into the Luton, just. It went in roots first. We realised we now had it in like a fish trap, and that extracting the branches, with them forking into the van sides, was going to be a nightmare. At that stage, that was the main challenge of the day.

Coming back over the Brecon Beacons, it got a lot worse. From the heath and sedge at the side of the road, a lamb shot across in front of us. The poor thing didn’t stand a chance. Mercifully it was killed instantly. So was the front of the van. There was a small hole too in the radiator. However, it was not pouring out, and so I thought I would drive it to Brecon, the closest town. If it was getting hot by then, I would see help there.

My sister had come down in her car to help. As I got towards Brecon, I could see the temperature gauge start to climb. I was not going to blow up the van, and so I stopped in a lay-by. I called my sister. She turned round, came back and found me.

I had no idea what to do. Serendipity took over. My sister had worked at Brecon and she recalled that the vans used by the National Park sometimes were taken to a garage on the edge of town. The place specialised in trucks. So off she went for advice. Half an hour later she returned with ten bottles of Buxton water and a canister of sludge. Apparently, this stuff was designed to fix lorry radiators, even with very big holes. We gave it another half hour to cool down and then we poured it into the rad with the water. It worked. We sailed back to the garden.

After that, decanting the tree did not seem such a daunting task. We got it off just before it got dark. Put a hose on the old duvet tied round the roots, and came back the next day to plant. It cost £250 excess on the van, but the tree was back safe. If only the same were true for the lamb.

We have had no other disasters on a similar scale. But we have destroyed tools and scratched the boots of cars, and a small scratch on my sister’s bumper moving things we should not have. We have demolished bits of fence, pulled out a fence post, broken the outside tap. I have tripped over twice; second time I loosened a tooth. Not great.

Nonetheless, luck has been on our side. There have certainly been things that went wrong and turned out for the best. I have found things that were great for the garden, but the person couldn’t wait for collection.

The azaleas and rhododendron section is planted. To divide from the rest, soon we will build a ‘four-eye’ bamboo fence. This will make it look like a wood with a grass plain in front. We have some fantastic swaying grasses for that part.

There was a garden down in Cardiff that had many peris, camellia and aucuba. They wanted them moved to build a drive. We fixed to go three days later. All arranged, but they gave them to someone else. Within their rights, of course; annoying though as one makes plans about such things. Then someone offered me a Picea abies: a horizontal Christmas tree. They are so fantastic. Van was already booked. Down to Swansea and we had another star of the garden. It’s nearly 2m across. They grow 10-15cm a year. We never could have expected to find one as mature as that. Things are sometimes meant to be. Miraculously it’s doing fine.

We also landed on our feet with eight rocks from Silverstone, the largest of which is the Whale. Or maybe they landed on their feet. We collected them and they went to a field at Justin’s mother’s. They were there three months. We looked at them many times and we tried to work out where they should go in the garden. We couldn’t.

There is a local legend that at Hindwell down the road, the four stones of the nearby stone circle, when the church bell rings, walk over to the lake at the farm and have a drink. It’s a famous place, as the brother and cousin of Mary Wordsworth farmed there and William visited for two periods of almost six months, his sister Dorothy, again and again. None of them record seeing the stones walk down to the lake.

The rocks around the black pine look fantastic in dusting of snow. Its given us a taste of just how beautiful it will look in all seasons.

But maybe stones do walk. Ours did. Once we got them on site, it seemed as if they were telling us where they should go. And the pareidolic interpretations became clear. We just needed to give the stones time to speak. Maybe that was a lesson in serendipity: that patience brings good fortune. Each stone called out some living form: whale, eel, cormorant, dolphin, shark. That informed the symbolic placement. By the time we got the last one in place, it was clear that was where they had always been meant to be.

Was this luck? Was it animism? I ascribe it to the eye becoming accustomed to a new way of seeing. I think that way of seeing is what seems serendipitous but is simply one dialling-down the meaning police in one’s head. We can learn to seek out plurality and opportunity.

At a fundamental level, our eyes stopped imposing closure and we looked instead for possibility. If the idea that one makes one’s own luck has truth in it, it is in the fact one can make oneself open to luck… and we became that.

It’s probably a bad way of surviving if you cannot tell a ginger tom close by from a more distant tiger. That’s OK. There are not many of those in the Welsh Marches (tigers that is). For gardening, seeing a range is essential. We do it all the time: shape, colour, texture. We try to envisage how a garden will shift through the seasons. This is simply an extension. To let shapes indicate, simply by contour without detail intervening, or minimal detail at least.

This process meant we saw the jutting lower jaw and the eye and the bulbous head of a turtle. It also meant we found the smaller rocks that make the forms of sea creatures that now jut from the banks of the dry stream walls. Once the process starts, scale becomes another detail to be occluded in this comparative act.

The garden was shaped by luck. Eight rocks that formed a whale and stars about it that gave the garden its name. The stones’ anthropomorphism in turn shaped the idea of a garden that was symbolic of the world in many forms, land, sea, heavens.

Sometimes luck has been less romantic but so important nonetheless. The pagoda is not big enough to be a studio. It needs a hidden extension to the rear. How to build in a simple, environmentally sound way? People don’t give away OSB for covering a wooden frame. Once second hand, it’s generally firewood. Then I saw a fantastic local guy, an oak joiner of huge skill, was giving away just what we needed: Metal insulated panels. The joiner wanted to merge his workshop into the next industrial unit. The old dividing wall, 14 sections, £221 each new, came our way. Now we have something that strengthens the frame and has 70mm of insulation too.

Other people have given me PIR sheets. Together, we can build beautiful, fantastic, modern, strong, environmentally sound structure.

This good fortune has been repeated many times. One plant led to another. One donor found a friend who could also help. They did so in turn, thereafter. One find of building materials allowed me to consider other items I might find. Sometimes people have conducted a stock take of their shed, loft, garage and asked me to take my pick.

This process has taught me flexibility. The project is more a river finding its route than a Roman road straight over hill and dale.

In the end, however, the garden decides. A plant may survive moving, it may not. A stone may fit and that is the end of that, it’s not moving elsewhere. We had one huge stone. 1.2 tonnes we reckon. I was sure it should be a seat to admire the garden, looking towards the pagoda. It would be a chance to pause on entry, or to look back on exit. But it was not to be. It became clear that the swirl of the stones around the Black Pine was incomplete. One more rock and a Fibonacci Sequence would be completed, joining tree and mound, across the garden via the guardian rocks of the dry stream. That was that. A rock that was meant, in my mind, to be flat and sat upon, became a striking monolith. Like the rest, now it looks like it has been there since the dawn of time.

When one takes in the dynamic of chance, the process fails if the roll of the dice is then ignored.

And the dice have rolled. The biggest luck was that the 5m wide Acer we transplanted has survived. It was crazy to move it in May. There was no chance. We had to trust to luck. The garden answered. I now feel it always will answer, in time of need, a horticultural version of Arthur and his sleeping knights.

It was quite a long break between part 4 and this article. I went to Germany to take my wife to her relatives. Then Christmas. Then snow (as the photos show). However, next week, the paths having now been cut, we will plant the rest of the main garden and put in the bridge.

So there will be much to report and the shape of the garden will be far clearer in photos.

We should be in a good space, then, for the next article in the series. I will look at the symbolism of the garden: how it can be seen, as described above, as sea, as land, as heavens. How I have tried to create a dialogue with the Celtic imagery that abounds in the area, such as the amazing church carvings at Kilpeck. I shall soon talk about the planting too and how the choices in that regard will work with the hard-landscaping to achieve this symbolic and cultural dialogue.

This will lead to considering how the garden will change through the seasons. That in turn leads to how it will be enjoyed and how the generosity of others will be repaid in use as a social and artistic space.

So more to come soon.

Next month I will be launching the Haiku of Solar Terms, 365 haiku, one a day, written in a Cotswolds garden that was, during lockdown, the most wonderful Edenic prison possible.

By the time that finishes, I can begin a sequel, 365 days tracing a year in a garden called Where the Whale Talks to the Stars.

How serendipitous is that!

Coming soon - Part 6 of How to Build a Mitate-mono (transformative upcycling) Japanese Garden.