St Mawgan's Japanese Garden: getting Zen in Cornwall
Over the summer, I landed a fantastic book brief with Summersdale publishers. The brief was, simply, to write a short book introducing readers to the idea of bringing the principles of Zen into their lives. I spent the first fortnight of September utterly focused on researching and writing this little book and, at some point, became fascinated with the concept of wabi-sabi and the Zen garden.
Wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic concept that revolves around the beauty of impermanence, imperfection and incompleteness. A broken bowl lovingly repaired, gradual wear and tear, ageing, vines growing out of a crack in the wall — these are wabi-sabi. The concept is, frankly, a huge relief for someone brought up in a Western society that craves impossible perfection and eternal youth.
Zen gardens are a subtype of Japanese gardens, and are specifically designed to aid meditation. They use plants sparingly, focusing instead of a few large rocks in a raked sea of gravel. As moss grows on the rocks and leaves drift down from above, you can see wabi-sabi in these places too.
So, I looked up the nearest Zen garden. And went.
Finding St Mawgan
Not far from Newquay, in the folds of the Cornish landscape, lies the tiny village of St Mawgan. And in this historic village sits The Japanese Garden, an extraordinary pocket of peace, developed by Robert and Stella Hore in the 90s. Starting off as a bonsai nursery and being lovingly transformed into a Japanese Garden, it must've taken a massive amount of work and vision to turn the land into what it is today.
Lead Down the Garden Path
It's a September Sunday, a few weeks after the crowds have left Cornwall although the sun and its warmth are lingering. We arrive at St Mawgan's Japanese Garden the moment it opens and are greeted by a friendly women who instructs us to head left and then do as we please.
The garden is immediately arresting. It lies at the bottom of a valley, tucked away from everything, breathing slowly and lulling you into an altogether different world. Bamboo clusters alongside the winding path, moss-covered rocks and lichen-skinned statues punctuate the plants. Acer fan out, tinged red to greet the oncoming autumn.
Within the grounds lies a Zen garden with three granite boulders surrounded by gravel. Every day the gravel is raked and the garden is reborn. There are benches so you can sit and contemplate and it truly is a tremendously peaceful place.
As I sit, a Buddha statue does so to my right and upon his hand lies an orizuru, a paper crane. I search my wallet a find a scrap of paper, setting about making another. I've known how to do this singular origami model since I was 11. Sitting in a Lake District youth hostel dorm room, a Japanese woman taught me how to make this most important of origami shapes. I became a little hooked on it, making hundreds over the subsequent years every time I had a spare bit of paper or an unused napkin. Perhaps they're never perfect, but hey, wabi-sabi.
We meander onwards through the garden and marvel at the bonsai in the nursery; aged, twisted trees in miniature. By the time we leave we've been there an hour an a half, something I cannot believe and would've at most said 45 minutes. We find ourselves drifting through the rest of our day, an undercurrent of calm with us at all times, as though we can't quite shake off a dream. That's what St Mawgan's Japanese Garden is like—a dreamworld—which is ironic, as it draws you into the present moment so easily that, if anything, while we were there we were in the real world.
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