The Story Behind Our Japanese Garden

The first parcel from Kyoto arrived on a grey November morning – the kind Cornwall specializes in. Inside the box were three small maples wrapped carefully in damp newspaper. They'd travelled 6,000 miles to reach us.

That was over twenty years ago. Those maples are still here, though you'd hardly recognise them now. One has become what the Tree Register officially calls a "Champion Tree" – the finest specimen of its kind in Britain. Not bad for something that arrived looking half-dead in a cardboard box.

How the Garden Found Its Place

The Japanese Garden wasn't planned. We'd been reading about Shakkei – the Japanese art of "borrowed scenery" – and kept looking at one particular spot where you could see right across to our lake and meadows. The view seemed to frame itself.

In traditional Japanese design, you don't fight the landscape. You work with what's already there. We kept the old oaks that had stood on that ground for a century or more. They now form the canopy, filtering light in a way that changes completely as the day moves on.

"Every Japanese garden is a kind of poem. The rocks represent mountains. Water represents the sea. The bridge? That's the journey we're all on."

The Kyoto Connection

A chance meeting with a botanist visiting from Kyoto led to something unexpected: a standing arrangement to receive plants directly from their botanical garden. Every year, new specimens arrive – acers, camellias, bamboos – each one grown in Japan, carrying something of that place with it.

Several have now grown into Champion Trees. There's something wonderful about that – plants from the other side of the world finding Cornwall so agreeable that they grow better here than anywhere else in the country.

A Place to Stop

We've come to appreciate how visitors use this space. People sit. They're quiet. In a world that's constantly shouting, that feels rather valuable.

The garden changes through the seasons – spring blossom, summer shade, autumn fire, winter bones – but it's the stillness that stays constant. That's what we were trying to create. A place to stop for a while.