Many years ago.......

.....in a small market town in Derbyshire, some fool decided that building a Japanese garden and tea house would be a good plan and probably wouldn't take all that long. That fool was me and eight years later, it's still not finished! However, we have just about finished renovating our 1920's house, learnt how to grow fruit and vegetables, made a lot of other changes in the garden and had a life with our gorgeous daughters, so all is not lost!

I'm not known as a speedy blogger and many of my posts refer back to stuff we did ages ago - ok, MOST of my posts are about about stuff we did ages ago...life gets in the way of blogging at times! Today's post is no exception. Today we're going back 4 years to the finishing off of the top pond and the tea house courtyard....if I can find the right photos after all this time!

We'll start with Himself putting my granite lantern into the pond....and making it work, obviously!
He put a couple of large flatish stones on the pond shelf before drilling a hole for the wire in another stone and resting that on top. The water looks skanky because we hadn't got the filter working at that time - the water is lovely and clear now.

 The granite lantern came in 4 parts - because it was chuffing 'eavy and couldn't possibly have been hoiked into place as one complete lantern. The base went on top of the drilled stone,

it was of course perfectly level!

The light was then threaded through the hole and the wire was carefully placed in the small gap between the 2 base stones.
The clamps and stuff on the edge of the tea house veranda were because Himself had glued some mahogany pieces onto the edges to completely encase the softwood and protect it from the weather.

The second piece of the lantern went on next. In Japan, the windows are open  to the elements, but our elements are a bit too inclement for that, so I used pieces of plastic milk containers to provide protection - an idea I borrowed from Purelands, a Japanese Garden and Meditation Centre near Newark which is well worth a visit if you're in the area.

The mountain of soil inside the fruit cage will get explained in another post very soon!

Himself making sure he'd not dribbled glue onto the grantite whilst sticking the third piece on!

The fourth piece finally in place.

 Once Himself had done the heavy work, I could move in and do the arty-farty bit! I covered the shelf  and the surrounding edges with more small rocks, stones and pebbles. If there is one thing I can't abide with home-made ponds it's being able to see the liner - you can't see any liner anywhere around my ponds.......except if you lie on your tummy on the veranda and peer back underneath to the bit I can't get to! :-P

 A goodly chunk of the pond shelf and edge sorted and the waterlillies in place in the deep bit of the pond.

Himself's next task (it's begining to sound like 'The Twelve Labours of Hercules' here!) was to make me a Tsukubai - a stone water basin. Traditionally they are smoother on the outside, often rounded, but hey - we had lots of big rocks lying around the yard....!

First he drilled a load of holes,

 before chiseling the stone out

 to make a nice smooth central water hole.

The only slight problem was that he'd done the job down on the yard and the tea house courtyard was about 100 yards up the garden! Everywhere is UP in our garden, including the stone, which was levered up

 and placed in our long-suffering wheelbarrow for Himself, Last-Born and the Drummer Boy to take up the garden. I can't remember which bit of me I'd injured at that point or how, but I was on light duties and therefore exempt from rock hauling!

hence we got photos.

There are no photos of getting it into place because I was too busy bossing them around and choosing which face of the stone I wanted facing outwards to take any!

The Wonderful Pete had put the step stone in place the previous weekend (but can I 'eckerslike find those photos!) and I laid down the stepping stones - in Japanese gardens the stepping stones are always deliberately close together to make you slow down as you walk on them so that you have chance to take in your surroundings.

They were then taken up so that sand could be put down

A fully sanded courtyard.

Then some left over butyl pond liner was put on top of the sand as a weed suppressant

before I had the fun job of putting all the pebbles down in the courtyard - individually handpicked and carefully placed, obviously!

 before putting pea gravel on the path from the bridge to the courtyard and blending in where they met. And so it has remained ever since!

To finish off, I've added in a few photos of how it looks now at 6.45pm on a grey and wet June day - when we've had stonking hot sunny weather for days, I know, I know - should have taken 'em yesterday!

 There will one day be a rainchain from the roof to the basin to fill it with fresh rainwater. At the moment I use the ladle to fill it with pond water ...but I do have to be careful at this time of year as I have been known to accidentally ladle tadpoles in as well!

 The granite lantern is a bit greener than it really ought to be ;-P

 Hope you enjoyed your tour? It's not finished yet....will it ever be?! I'm in the middle of replacing a lot of the 'filler' grasses with hebes, euphorbias and box balls. I'm also planting moss and other ground cover. Still got 2 paths to finish and some other stuff to do, so watch this space!

Building the waterfall and stream .......at last!

I'm bone tired, I've got mysterious bruises all over my legs, my hands don't want to work properly and my get-up-and-go has completely scarpered. It must be Monday morning!

Why do I never learn? Why don't I stop shifting soil, moving rocks or whatever half an hour before exhaustion sets in, rather than just after?!Why do I continue to delude myself that I have the fitness and energy levels of a 22 year old when every Monday my body tells me otherwise?!

ANYWAY! Enough of feeling sorry for myself - it was totally self-inflicted and does not deserve sympathy, SO, back to last summer.......waterfall and stream building, yeah! The summer of '08 was not the best British summer we've ever had! It tipped it down a lot of the time - but there were some good days and we grabbed them with both hands.

Before the waterfall stone could be put in place I had to dig out the stream route so that Himself could see the angle the stone needed to be set at in the pond side. My red sweatshirt is on the main island stone. The stream will curve round behind the island before curving back towards the right to flow down to the bottom pond.



Himself was allowed to build ONE straight wall in the pond - which was to be under the waterfall stone and, therefore, completely hidden!

The water in the pond was held back by one of our chunky wooden beams which was long enough to reach right across the pond and to have the butyl liner and fleece liner draped back over it. The light grey fabric is the fleece liner. It was all kept in place by a couple of random bits of stone carefully plonked on top!



Himself had replaced the original waterfall stone after it had broken in two after being accidentaly dropped when being moved. The photo below shows the original stone, with its nice curved shape - but, apparently, it was a pig to place and get level........ Hmm, was the breakage really an accident?!!



There are no photos of Himself laying the new waterfall stone as I was off doing something else at the time, so wasn't around to take photos!

Once the stone was levelled to Himself's wonderfully perfectionist standards and satisfaction, it had to be tested to check that the water would flow evenly over all its width. Himself and the ever magnificent Pete roughly laid both liners down the stream bed and into the bottom pond, which was then filled by hosepipe until there was enough water to be pumped up to the fill the top pond whilst still leaving a decent level in the bottom pond. (You can tell from the description who worked out all the technical details like flow rate etc - and it wasn't me!)



The new posh German pump was turned on and we stood with baited breath as the top pond water level slowly rose and began to trickle smoothly and SO evenly over the waterfall and into the stream bed. Shouts of joy (me!) and amazement (Himself!) could be heard across Chesterfield.
Pete just laughed at us!



The water looks brackish because it had been sitting in the pond for several weeks with no filter system and there is reflected light from all the trees that surround it, but it wasn't quite as bad as it looks in the photo - honest!

The water then burbled, gurgled and flowed its way merrily down the proto-stream until it finally fell into the bottom pond for the very first time. I was well giddy by this point and nearly toppled into the bottom pond in my excitement!



Another excellent weekend's work!

Yet more ways to get big rocks into a pond!

Having successfully completed the beach and retaining wall end of the pond, we finally turned our minds to the waterfall end - something Himself had been trying to block out (...or should that be 'avoid'?) for quite some time!

As the pond is supposed to look like it's full of rocks which have been carried downstream from Mount Fuji in the spring snowmelt (yeah, yeah - I know....... over-active imagination going at full pelt again!), we needed a couple of big rocks to sit one either side of the waterfall stone to look like the waterfall had been created by the rocks forcing the water through the narrow gap between them - are you still with me or has my imagination gone too far this time?!


Himself and Calamity (one of Last-Born's vast entourage of admirers!) built two scaffold towers, one either side of the waterfall, and used some of the strongest timbers from our random collection of 'bits' to make the support between the towers for the chain hoist to be fastened to, to allow us to hoist the rocks out over the edge of the pond and lowered down to reach the shelf.


I was still having to be careful because of problems with the scar tissue from my surgery, so I settled for making sure the pond liner on the shelf was nice and flat with no sharp edges on the folds.

Like when we put the other big rocks into the pond, I was only allowed one shot at choosing the right ones - so the pressure was on! Rocks were looked at from all angles, rotated, stood on end, discarded, reclaimed, discarded again...........until Himself bellowed "JUST CHOOSE!....... They're going to be mostly covered with water anyway!"

This did rather focus my mind somewhat and two were chosen. Himself and Calamity manhandled the stones to almost at the pond's edge.

Himself then chisled the bottom of the rock to make it slightly angled so that it would lean back a little bit against the pond wall. Luckily sandstone (our local stone) is fairly soft and breaks easily, so it was quite a quick job to knock the appropriate amount off.


We then used levers to lift the rock up enough to get small beams underneath, which would allow us easy access for the strops. I am standing on the pond shelf, so you can see that the finished water depth will be right up at the top of my wellies! Later 'paddling' to put smaller stones in place proved that there was about 1cm clearance - so I had to be very careful not to 'slosh' or I got very soggy feet! ( I wasn't careful enough though........ I leant forward to place a stone and got a wellie full of water. Yuk!)


The two cross members in place and the strop ready to go round the stone.


Himself begining to make the 4 way loop round the rock ready for hoisting.


Himself ready to guide the rock out from under the scaffold to over the shelf, then down into position. I am hauling on the chain to lift the rock and Calamity is catching the chain to prevent chain grease from getting on everything!

The two rocks in place - the waterfall stone was still covered up at this point. We'd put several layers of assorted 'stuff' over it to protect it from mishap. Having broken one waterfall stone already, we weren't about to let it happen again!

Rocks in place, waterfall stone uncovered, water level back up to the correct height (or wellie depth!). Oh happy day!

How to do things in the wrong order!

Having filled the pond up, we had a few minor(!) crises when we realised that:

1. we hadn't dug the stream out properly

2. we hadn't put the waterfall stone in

3. Himself was convinced the side walls of the pond were about to collapse at any minute

4. we had got a large amount of water lapping up against where we needed to work

NOT one of our better moments!

Himself had an "it's all doomed" moment and I had a major hissy fit, resulting in a brief but loud rant at poor old Himself along the totally non-PC lines of "thick people build ponds, it's can't be SO difficult, what IS your problem?!!!". I did apologise very profusely later on.

I then set about emptying the pond with a trug and chucking all the water on the veg patch. Himself, being the more sensible less volatile one, built a temporary holding tank on the lawn and drained the water into that instead until the water level was down to shelf level.

We bought some plastic coated corrugated panels (meant for roofs, I think), cut them to size, used a plank to fold the liners over and clear where we needed to work then put the pond sized panels in place and back-filled with soil.

Himself working a panel into place near the mouth of where the stream will be.

The plank holding the liners out of the way.

Himself then built a wall to rest the waterfall stone securely on. The poor love tried so hard to put straight lines into the pond, all of which I refused to have and promptly removed on the grounds that natural ponds don't have straight lines. His wall was the only straight bit in the whole pond - and it got covered up once the mortar was dry - but he was happy because he knows it's there!

I got busy digging out the route for the stream. The group of rocks in front of me with my red sweatshirt on are the island. The stream route meanders between the island and all the other rocks behind me. No straight lines for me!

The Nutty Gnome mid-action.

Himself putting the waterfall stone in place. We had aquired the stone from a friend's garden. It looked great because it had been shaped by something/someone to have a gentle sloping curve in the middle - ideal for water to trickle over and look like it had worn the stone away over the millenia. It was taken in and out several times to get the height and levels perfect. Unfortunately, on one move, it was accidentally dropped and cracked in half down the middle. Himself was mortified.

I went to the local stone yard and scrambled about on their rejects pile until I found the perfect new waterfall stone - for a quid! (A quid is £1 or approximately $1.60). Bargain!