Creativity has many guises and creating a beautiful garden has got to be one of the most satisfying creative outlets. Our home has a contemporary Japanese feel architecturally and over the years the garden had become more zen with the creation of a koi pond but something was still lacking. So in November last year I decided it was time to tackle a long overdue dark patch in the garden that had become an unsightly dumping ground and to add insult to injury our boxer gods were using it for their ablutions, enough was enough!
Granted the site has the advantage of being situated under a canopy of Milkwood trees so this was an excellent start. I decided that we should create a little meditation room in this space but was not quite sure how it should look. Well after seeing all the really cute little Japanese tea house it would be! Unfortunately, I did not take before – and – after pics, but I would love to share with you pics of process.
I called my friend Andrew who studied landscape and architecture in America and Sweden and we got together on the site and spent days mulling over what and how. We took to drawing board and slowly first semblance of a plan started to emerge. A list of suitable plants that would grow in the shade and under the Milkwoods needed to be decided on. We also chose them for their texture and shape trying to include forms and elements that you would see in a Japanese garden and this took us on a journey into Japanese gardens across Japan. The beds were created, the gravel was selected the site was settled on for the little tea house and dead wood from the trees were cleared to let more light in. We walked and we paced and we reflected and we drew and slowly, something very beautiful started to emerge.
The project in principal is small but it needed time and patience. I decided to dedicate myself to this and enjoy the process. Andrew is gentle, creative and reflective and a really good listener and Dexter who happens to be a boat builder, enthusiastically took on the project with a zen like dedication to creating something slowly and beautifully.
So all in all I am thrilled with the results, there is still a long way to go to reach my end goal but I will keep you posted with further developments.
We noticed beauty in each stage of the building of the Tea House and so did our friends and family. A very close friends’ daughter got married in the skeleton and it was indeed a memorable wedding with all the guests marvelling at the wonderful energy of the space.
Then my young niece Hannah decided she would have her 13th birthday in the next phase of the building, by then the roof was up so she decorated the garden with lights and used our bohemian cushions to create fun them and finally Monica, my other niece, used the space for her photo shoot of our Indigo collection.
