Paths, Islands and Tai Chi circles!

So ....... we're still in the summer of 2007 and progressing with the paths. The technique involved digging a big path-route ditch, moving the soil to a spot that I just know I'll need to shift it from again in about 2 months time (but there's nowhere else to put it as all the previously clear ground is now full of stones of assorted sizes!), moving the sandstone bedrock large-ish pieces from where I put that about about 2 months ago (because there was nowhere else to put it ... etc, etc) and dumping them into the path ditch, roughly leveling them out then covering the large-ish pieces with a deep layer of smaller pieces followed by a layer of tiny pieces, then jumping up and down on the lot to bed them all down. It was all topped off with a layer of sand which had been sieved through our giant sieve earlier in the day.

Once I'm quite happy with all this work, Himself comes along and says we need to be sure that we've backfilled properly between the path and the soil. My response at this point is "*#~#*#**~~~*"!!! - which roughly translates as "do it yourself - please"!


So Himself and our dear friend Pete did!
The backfilling involved some complicated manouveres with all our spades and shovels. They were put in behind the bedrock pieces and then gently levered so that there was a gap (where there wasn't one before!) between the path and the soil, which then had extra soil put down it and heeled in firmly. This was repeated along the full lengths of both sides of all the paths.
I am firmly convinced that Himself had delusions of grandeur at this point and thought he was actually building a motorway rather than a little path!

Pete has been a star in the garden too - he regularly comes to stay for the weekend, works very hard both days, then goes home again! He's also helped Himself with the technical side of planning the Tea House and will be involved in the building of it too. He is one of my oldest (in that we've known each other sine I was 15!) and dearest friends - and I'm going to do his garden when we've finished this!


Himself and Pete working on the bottom path.

How to build a Tai Chi training circle:
First demolish an old cold frame that was home for some very happy slugs and snails who had been continually eating all my salad seedlings.
Clean up all the old bricks then lug them across to the other side of the garden four at a time because Himself is using the barrow for something else.
Fail to find any clear area to put them, so dump them on the path thus creating a major Health and Safety issue as they are now in everyone's way.
Realise that where you want to put said circle is not flat - nowhere near flat, not even vaguely level!
Panic!
Call for Himself and Pete for advice, safe in the knowledge that they won't be able to resist the challenge of sorting it out.
Watch admiringly as they work out levels, heights and any other mathematical things they can think of.
Go dig a bit more path whilst they sort it out!


Nice level area dug into the slope, with the first layer of bricks being put into place. The plank balancing on the post is the height of the top layer of bricks.

The circle is one metre in diameter. I quite fancied using an old millstone as there are plenty available locally and the top would have been nice and smooth to train on, but they were all only 90cms in diameter and that was just that wee bit too small for comfort!


Second layer.
Each layer of bricks also had the central area filled with bricks and brick bits before having sand firmly pushed down all the gaps.


Looking from the path to the top layer of the circle, now with gravel added.
At some point this spring, the circle will be taken apart again so that we can mix cement powder with the sand - Himself is worried that, despite all the earth banked up round it, the circle will shift whilst I'm training - I'm not QUITE sure what he thinks I'm going to be doing on there!!!

The circle overlooks the bottom bridge and the bottom pond. The gap between the circle and the path with be packed with soil which will gently slope up to the circle and, eventually, have a top layer of moss to cover it. There will be no plants on this area as I am likely to kick them as I train!




We then realised that we hadn't laid the power cable across to where I want a granite lantern - we got REALLY good at undoing things to put in a bit we'd missed out!
This is Himself mid cable run.


One Tai Chi circle almost complete! There is a small stone circle to go in the middle, level with the bricks, but this won't be put on until the cementing stage.
The sand covered top path is visible beyond the circle, then peters out to stones by the circle. The path the skirts the circle where the spade is before turning right to cross the bridge.


Ceefer cat doing quality control on the partially dug out bottom pond!



How to manouver big rocks:
Borrow several big strong blokes!

Having used the flintstones trolley to get the rocks up the garden in the first place, we had to resort to man power (plus a bit of girlie power!) to get them to where I wanted them and put them into place - and, often, to dig them up and take them out again because they just weren't QUITE right there after all! (sorry lads!)

Himself, Owen and Chris working on the island stones. The horizontal stone had to be moved into a slightly different position twice because they put it where they thought it should go rather than where I'd said I wanted it!

Himself and our assistants got very good at using levers to shift the stones around - they also learnt to keep their toes well out of the way!

The large rock lying horizontally on the left of the photo was my first choice for the biggest island stone - but once it was in place and upright it just looked WRONG. I couldn't explain why it was wrong, it just was. So, bless 'em, they took it out again and put another one in instead - and I had chosen the right one that time!

Some rocks were right first time, but it was often a case of trial and error - not a problem with the little rocks, but hard work on the big ones!

Right ....where had I got to? Oh yes, path building!

In order to explain the next bit, I've had to go back in time to two springs ago - to 2007 - before we'd really got very far on digging out the top pond. The work on the garden was not done in any logical order (suprise, suprise!), it was done in my order and often depended on what I felt like doing and how bored (or aching) I was with working on a particular bit - but mostly to try to get some shape and structure in place so that everyone else could begin to understand my still apparently unfathomable design plan!

This is looking north up the garden. The bottom pond, where the spade is sticking up, has been partially dug out by one of Last-Born's friends (thanks Luke!) and stayed like that for about a year, but at least it showed where the pond was. Himself is digging away in the top pond.

The paths form a sort of wiggly Y shape with a right-handed curve coming off the bottom of the Y. The bottom path forms the curve at the bottom of the Y. The path enters the garden at the right hand edge of this photo behind the bamboos. It then crosses the as yet to be dug stream which is marked out by the (just visible) hosepipe and curves round to go between the circle of stones (that currently looks like a mini Stonehenge but is, in fact, going to be my tai chi training circle) and the pile of soil that will become the island of rocks. It then seperates roughly where the green trug is. One path goes to the right of the top pond up towards the piles of tree trunk slices (long story!), which is where the tea house will eventually be, and the other path goes to the left towards the pink trug and wheelbarrow to meet up with the hideous crazy paving path, which forms the top route into the garden.

The left-hand path meets the current path immediately below where the grass begins, just to the left of the barrow. The right-hand path will have to wait until I've redistributed the mountains of soil at the right-hand side of the photo! (approximately a year!!)

Himself working on the pond, whilst I dig the footings for the path.

It's quite deep for a footpath (a minor bone of contention as it was Himself's idea, but I had to dig it...!) but we desperately needed to :

a) gain more topsoil to get the levels right and

b) get rid of all the sandstone rubble we'd accumulated from digging up bedrock! and

c) it kept Himself very happy that we had remained cost and waste neutral so far!

More path footings. That year, work was also dictated by where the shade was! I'm in the shade from our cooking apple tree. we couldn't work on the pond beyond about 2.30pm as it was just too hot in the direct sunlight.

The footings were varying depths depending on the levels we needed around different parts of the garden. The two wooden posts are levels markers and the clear pipe is filled with water and was our giant spirit level.

For all I tease Himself, I could not have done this project without his mathamatical wizardry and attention to detail. I would not have known where to start to work out what the levels needed to be, let alone known how to do them - so, for all of that, and way, way more (including working blind because you still didn't really understand what I was up to!), I thank you from the bottom of my heart and pond my love!

Yes, we have a bridge!

This is the bottom bridge, below the island. The path has been roughly dug out and comes in at the top right of the photo beyond the pink trug. It'll meet the bridge, then come off this side at a slight angle so that it can come closer to the tai chi circle, where it will stay a constant distance from the circle but match the curve of the perimeter until it is at the point where it can split.

Looking up over the bottom pond to see the stream route. It goes under the bridge (obviously!) then curves to the right before looping left round the back of the island. Poor old Himself so desperately wanted nice clean, straight lines everywhere and I insisted on curves - guess which are easier to do!!

Yeah - it's snowing!!!

A slight digression from my pond today as it's finally snowing here! I've been reading loads of blogs from North America and moaning about the amount of snow they've got compared to our complete lack of it here - but NO MORE! We too have snow, not as much as America admittedly, but we've got it -great big white flakes drifting lazily down, covering everything in a soft white blanket, muffling sound, temporarily transforming the garden into a place of wonder and excitement, I can hear squeals of delight from the neighbours' children as they throw snowballs, it's showing up the fox, bird and squirrel prints and causing Ceefer cat to blame me for his cold, wet paws, .......... alright, alright, so I get excited about snow - but I'm only 8 on the inside, so what do you expect? ALL 8 year old love snow!

The front of the house - with the drive looking rather steeper than normal!

The 'island' on the loop at the front of the house. The main drive is on the right hand side and goes up the steep bit past the house to the back yard and garage. The drive loops round the island and joins back onto the main drive to go out through the gates to the road. The large tree on the left hand edge on the island is Derbyshire's oldest flowering cherry tree. It (and several of the other trees around it) has got a Preservation Order on it, so no work can be done on it without written permission from the local council - and the work has to be done by a Council approved Arborialist.

I have plans for the island........just a little bit of remedial work to transform it into a Japanese dry river bed, with mossy bankings, a grassed area, a seat etc, etc. It won't happen this year, but it will happen!

(note my usual naivety about the amount of work involved !)

A Garyia on the bottom of the island. It was transplanted - well, dug up and plonked there, from the Japanese garden area to prevent it from becoming a water plant! It seems to have taken well to its new spot - in that, it's not dead yet!

A Cordyline on the front terrace.

I bought this Cornus Alba Elegantissima a couple of weeks ago to go up in the Japanese garden and hadn't got round to planting it. It looks so beautiful against the white of the snow.

With the way the snow is coming down now, I should get an even better photo tomorrow.

Yeah, I love the snow!

A sneaky preview of part of the Japanese Garden!

The pond is frozen solid to a depth of about one inch.

Rocks - and how to move them!

Right, so! We had 9 tonnes of rocks of assorted sizes to move about 100 metres uphill over grass. What to do? - and, more importantly, how on earth to do it?!
Himself being the inventive genius that he is decided that modern technology just wasn't going to cut it and we had to think laterally ..........to the Flintstones.

At the top of our garden we have a copse of conifer trees (actually old Christmas trees planted over the years by the previous owners of our house). One of the trees had blown over in a winter storm and had died, so Himself decided that we could kill two birds with one stone - as it were, and put the trunk to a couple of good uses. We could use part of it to build a trolley for transporting the stones and the rest for an anomometer tower to see if we'd got good enough wind for a small windmill (to keep our solar panels company). But first we had to get the trunk down the garden- via a narrow path past the compost bins, between the vegetable plots whilst not hitting the greenhouse in the process!

The tree had fallen over because the old concrete path had prevented it growing any deep roots on the east (path) side of the tree, so it had not had the strength to resist a very strong westerly wind.

Himself dug up most of the tree root base, but couldn't get it all out. It's leaning over just beyond his spade.

He then cut four slices of trunk and made holes in the middles of all the pieces for axels. I reckon that the axel was an even greater invention than the wheel!

We had some old iron pipes that made excellent levers. We used them to lift the trunk onto the wheels/axels and to move the 'vehicle' onto the path.

Himself reckons that "next time" (whaaah!) he'll get the axel hole more central!

Note how Himself adopted a supervisory role at this point! He claimed it was necessary to allow the girls to fully experience how useful levers are in the real world and how even slightly built people can move huge objects with them! Neat trick I reckon!

They then hauled the trunk down the garden.

(The Japanese garden area is to the left of the raspberries - visible just beyond and to the left of the girls.)

So the tree got us two pairs of wheels on axels and an anomometer tower - but that's a story for another day! We then had to convert wheels into a trolley for rocks..........!

Himself got two pieces of 3x2 and drilled holes in them to allow the axels to be pushed through. Although the wheels were loose and had nothing to stop them from sliding sideways (- and off if we weren't watching them!), it also meant that we had the leway to move the 3x2's to one side or the other to get the lever pole in to move the trolley sideways/up/down etc. It also allowed us to remove the wheels completely to slide the rocks off once they were in the right -ish place.

As can be seen from my expression, some of the rocks were a bit chunky and a might heavy!

Levers are wonderful!

Around me are a few of the smaller stones - we either carried them up the garden, or got our friends to, or put them in the wheelbarrow.

This wasn't the biggest rock - that took six of us to move it!

Pushing worked well on the tarmac of the yard.....

but pulling was good too!

We used towing strops from the Land Rover to haul the trolley up the lawn (well, moss really). Once on the grass, the technique involvedlaying half the strop on the ground and standing on it to pull, heave and haul the trolley until we had run out of strop or the wheels were about to fall off! The remaining wheels were chocked to stop the trolley rolling back down the hill (- it only did it the once, then we learnt!) and the strop was pulled through, we stood on it, pulled again ... and again...and again until we eventually reached the right place and levered the rock off the trolley. Himself was very good at levering rocks into the correct position in the first place - but I often then decided that it wasn't the right place after all!

The Japanese garden starts beyond the blue trampoline, up the shadey slope by the oak tree and bench and through the gap in the greenery. That slope is steeper than it looks!