Japanese Garden item - update (Presteigne LD8)

I am still looking for items for my Japanese garden

A few weeks ago, I told many along the Welsh Marches, and over towards my old home in the Cotswolds, how I saved a genuine Japanese pagoda from a skip and was building a Japanese garden. I asked for help... wow did I get it!

So I want to thank people for the enormous generosity and support I have received. I want to thank people like the family over towards Newtown who gave me a beautiful blue conifer. It needed to be moved, so I carefully extracted it, rehomed it in a large tree planter, fed and watered it and will keep doing so until it the autumn when its new, permanent home will be ready. I have been given camellias, grasses, hibiscus, irises and bamboo. And rocks... amazing rocks. From Northamptonshire, I was given 8, 750kg Horton stone rocks. Thank you so much. Not just for the rocks, but the experience. They will be monumental within the garden, creating a primeval, ancient, spritual dimension. One of them looks like a breaching whale. You can tell it does, because, when my gardener’s son saw it, the first thing he said was ‘it’s a whale, dad.’ It makes one think that kami may, just possibly, walk the earth. Intimately watching these stones rise for the ground, be transported with cunning and brute force, see them prepared for positioning... it becomes easier to understand why prehistoric man in Europe, and many in Asia today, find monoliths so profound. Another lovely couple from mid-wales have given me some large, smooth stones that will form islands in the dry river bed and they will be cherished and revered too.

Others have given me more prosaic, but still vital items, like two house fulls of carpet to use to suppress weeds before planting, and pond liner to make pockets for marginal plants.

It has been amazing. I want to thank everyone. If anyone has items they wish to be rid of that might make this magical place even more special, please do be in touch. I would like to find more rocks to do path edging, some flat stones that can be pieced together (or cobbles) for the entrance, some suitable Douglas fir posts to make a Torii gate - a wonderful joiner has offered to do the making for free) some more statuary. And, in terms of plants, heathers and hebes would be great... and many things I haven’t even thought of! On that note, if anyone has advice, I would love to receive that too.

I was asked will the garden be open for charity? Yes. Definitely... but not until all of the people who have been so supportive have had a chance to come a join me for tea and soba noodles and an experience of how they turned an unused, unloved place into one of beauty and tranquility. And did so, largely, from things people no longer needed, or where, like the Japanese pagoda in then second picture, simply going to land-fill.