Bill & Marilyn's Japanese Garden

My name is Bill Hamilton. My wife is Marilyn Hamilton. We were both doctors and have lived in Bridge North now for 45 years. So when we came and moved into the house, one of the first things we did was we got rid of some of the fussy little rose beds, particularly at the back of the house and we just changed it into a lawn and we created a path to go around the lawn so that the children could play there. The gardener here is really my wife but sadly she's not so well now so I'm afraid you have to have me speaking. So the first thing that we did after that was my wife went to a design course at Perthshire and as a project she converted the front garden into a rather formal Victorian garden with four mirror beds and a little fountain in the middle. The important time really was in 2000 when we went to Japan. It was just an amazing holiday and that really kick-started the interest for my wife and I in Japanese gardens. Now when we came back from Japan I always liked tea so I said I'd love to have a tea house. Bill Tingey, who was now living in this country, said please can I design your tea house and we said well that sounds great. Now coming from a scientific background we thought Bill Tingey would come and measure out the space and these sort of things and advise us on things but no he came with a blank sheet of paper and what he said to us was what do you want to use this tea house for and we said well we'd quite like it a space that we could sleep in if we want and we'd quite like I was very keen on triathlons and with a friend we used to come and try and meditate in the garden somewhere we could just meditate in somewhere that was dry because sometimes of course you come back from running and it's tipping with rain and so on and meditating in the rain is not very easy. So we went through various ideas of what we might use the tea house for and then Bill Tingey then came up with the design of the tea house. Now this tea house is not like any other tea house in Japan and I think one of the important things about Japanese gardens in this country is that people shouldn't worry about what they build because what they build is what they want don't try and copy someone else particularly you can use other ideas but at the end of the day it has to be your garden and so he said well you want a little place that you can meditate so why don't we put a little seat at the back and make two gardens with it one a garden at the back which is a little courtyard garden and the other the more formal garden at the front which is the Karisensui garden and that seat at the back can be used as a step to get up onto the main part of the tea house and so this was the design that he produced and you won't find any tea house in Japan that has these two levels and so this was the design that suited us. As I said the garden wasn't that long when we moved in it and there was an apple orchard at the bottom and we managed to acquire this apple orchard our section of the apple orchard at the bottom and this was where we placed the tea house so first of all we had an archway that leads into this section and in the typical Japanese style when you look down the garden all you see is this archway you don't actually see the tea house and as you walk in there your view is transferred round to the entrance to the tea house and the entrance to the tea house is low not as low as many of the tea houses in Japan but the whole concept is to stop the samurai taking swords in and to humble yourself and go into the tea house. We have had odd tea ceremonies but we don't use it particularly then sometimes when our family are here because now our four children are all married we have 11 grandchildren and so there's we can't quite accommodate them all in the house these days so often particularly when the children were a bit younger sometimes the parents were quite keen to come and sleep in the tea house because they then got peace and quiet and it's been amazing that in the 23 years since it was built that there's been virtually no movement in this frame. We had to decide what the walls were going to be and we tried all different things and we've ended up with I forget what was in the centre of the walls there was some sort of material that we ended up with the best stuff and then it was covered in lime mortar plaster and this is the same material as is used in many of the National Trust properties and it has yellow dye incorporated into it so we've now got our tea house but at this time it was a tea house in an orchard and there was just grass and apple trees. The next step was to actually build the Japanese garden. My wife had a clear idea of what she wanted and she chatted with Robert Ketchell and Robert sort of suggested you know how we could do things and amazingly he just effectively wrote on the back of a fag packet the quantities he wanted of rocks and stones and so on and we then set off over a period of six months or so gathering these rocks and stones and I remember in particular going to Wales where my wife's cousin was who had a field with a stone wall that had fallen down and was causing trouble with her horses and she said well you can take all these stones and then we'd gathered together the silver grey gravel six millimetres silver grey gravel and we'd gathered other things we'd gathered some granite sets and so on reclaimed granite pieces and it was just lovely and I've always felt that a lot of the peace in Japanese gardens really relates to the stones and placing of the stones is a great art. There's a little section further down which was initially grass and we've gradually developed that into a more oriental area with a pebble path and an oak moon gate and other pathways there and then we've also we've done various trips in in the late 1990s we went to the Himalayas and we loved the prayer flags there so we have had prayer flags initially they were outside the house but now they're down at the bottom of the garden and we've had to change the flags a few times but we love having those flags so the garden is not just a Japanese garden it's really a whole series of different rooms with the formal garden at the front with gardens outside our dining room and kitchen with a shade border down one side with a grassy area with borders along the side of that and then the entrance to this the Japanese area and then the the more Chinese and Nepalese area at the bottom. My wife was essentially a perfectionist and so she would be out in all weathers and she'd be happily there all day long just tidying up the garden getting it right and she knew everything about all the plants all their names and all those things to maintain them. I in contrast knew virtually nothing about the plants but did the sort of heavy lifting and that was really my role. Sadly my wife is not so well and in the last few years she has not been able to maintain the garden so unfortunately the garden has had to put up with and I'm not really a very good gardener I'm a bit more the sort of person who like puts a plant pot on the head and shaves around it sort of thing the finer points but fortunately for the last couple of years Andrew Deighton has kindly said he will come and help us in the garden. Now Andrew Deighton has been involved with the Japanese Garden Society for quite a long time he has a lovely garden in Derby and he's happy to come all the way from there to here which can take him up to two hours but it's such a pleasure really to have the garden there's no way that we're going to move away from here unless we absolutely have to because it is our sort of pride and joy really.