A Little Zen Yng Nghymru

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I've a small patch of the garden, in front of the studio, that I started to do something with just after the studio was built: around eleven years ago. I've constructed several drystone walls around our plot, including one around this very small spot. I put a standing stone near the centre of this tiny sub-garden at the time, but have done nothing else with it since then: in fact, it has simply acted as a place to park the cement mixer and various bits of detritus.

I decided this afternoon that the time was now ripe to take a serious view on this and think about what to actually turn it into. So I've decided on a small Japanese-style dry Zen garden, incorporating the standing stone as its heart. Over the last week I've unearthed some nice stones from other parts of the garden, and with some of these and two or three bags of smallish stone chippings, I'll fashion something hopefully elegant and peaceful. 

To be honest I've wanted a Zen garden since the first time I visited the one at Cannon Hill Park in Birmingham as a teenager, so this is a good opportunity to give it a go. The fact that this spot is North-facing means that on hot Summer days you can take advantage of the shade afforded by the studio itself, and might assist in promoting the growth of mosses on some of the stones: the finished article will be a kind of Oriental-Welsh meditation: I might even build a porch to sit under on warm, rainy days...


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