Nottinghamshire 3 - a Japanese Garden, meditation, scones and peace and solitude

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St Augustine is reputed to have said "The world is a book and those who do not travel only read a page". How true that sentiment is. The page you read might be interesting with many things to see or hear about but the page should be the catalyst that makes you want to read the rest of the book. And who knows where that book might take you if you choose to follow it.

Time is moving quickly and our first trip into the world of motorhoming is creeping up on us quickly. It has come to the point that we are counting the trip down in days - 30 days until we set out for the Channel Tunnel and Southern Spain. Only 4 more weekends - the lists are endless . Only 7 more working days as Good Friday and Easter Monday fall in between.

Suzy has been cleaned inside but not outside. Her layer of dust and dirt outside will need to wait until we get a fair day without wind to get out the water and brushes and give her a much needed Spring clean. A few slices of mouldy old bread found deep in the back of a cupboard, long forgotten over the winter months the duvalay covers washed, aired and ironed and smelling Spring fresh . The carpets cleaned and vacuumed. The winters dust cleared out. The food store cupboards are beginning to be filled with goodies for the trip. As usual items have needed to be replaced - Tom Tom died a death and a new one is on its way. That should arrive tomorrow. And what is it about reading others blogs that makes you think of buying new gadgets for Suzy. Our latest addition to the family of gadgets is a window mounted Snooper crashcam which we intend to use to film our route each day. It can be download to the computer, saved and watched on a cold miserable winter night reminding us of our travels. How many times have we driven through the snow covered passes between the Swiss and Austrian mountains or along the coast of Italy and wished and hoped that the photographs do the trip justice . The stills are good and gave a snapshot of a moment in time but it's frozen. They don't always convey what you actually saw at the time sadly. Perhaps the crash cam can make the whole experience an even better one. Time has to be found to programme it in, work out where to place it on the windscreen and to buy extra hard drive storage to download the data on to every couple of days. It is intended to help motorists avoid insurance scams but there seems we think another use which might be to give us an enhanced holiday experience. Time will tell.

Suzy needs a top of LPG as we used much of the gas in November and December when we extended camping when we were house hunting. So a short trip is needed down the M1 to the motorway services to fill up. The gas should on our usage last us the whole of the four week trip. Our toll devices have been pre-ordered from Toll Tickets in Germany and should arrive prior to our trip. They have never let us down yet and with typical German efficiency we don't expect a hiccough this time. We need the toll device for southern Spain as some of the roads we will use will be toll ones. .

The days are getting longer now that the clocks have moved forward by one hour. It feels more Springlike with gardens bright yellow. Full of the nodding heads of the daffodils, the dainty Forsythia and the gentle lemon petals of the Primroses. The hedgerows are starting to colour up green with the fresh new buds of the leaves. We have heard the rat a tat tap hammering of the woodpecker in the woods and seen our first field of yellow flowering Oilseed Rape on our way through Nottinghamshire this morning.

We have our tickets for the train already and leave from Folkestone at 11.20. An earlier departure time than we are used to. When travelling from Wales the journey takes 6 and a half hours so we tended to leave Britain at 1.20 or 2.20. As we fall onto the M1 within a few minutes and this reduces the journey time down to 5 hours we should be able to get to France much easier and quicker but it is still looking as if we will need to set off at silly o'clock when it is dark and gloomy. It is a Sunday departure this time. The first Sunday we have ever tried so the motorway ought to be fairly quiet and we plan to get further into France on Day 1 if everything goes according to Plan B which we are now on.

Our first short trip was without Suzy. An hours drive from home to Purelands Japanese Gardens near to Newark courtesy of Amazon Local. We were informed via the internet of a local Meditation Centre and Japanese Garden described as "one of the AA's Inspirational Gardens of the World" The offer was for two tickets for £8 which would prove to be a saving of £4 on entrance. The offer was too good to miss particularly as we were able to use it for a Mothers Day present. It is hard sometimes to think of an appropriate useful gift when you are catering for a 90 year old who has everything and needs nothing.

The gardens were tightly packed into a 2 acre site between houses in the tiny village of North Clifton an hours drive from home. Typically had we gone yesterday we would have been greeted by wall to wall sunshine. We picked today as the forecasters had given the best day of the week. However they got it wrong. Sand had blown in from the Sahara covering cars with a fine red layer. Pollution from the near continent had produced a smog worthy of the pea soupers remembered from the 1950's in the days before the Clean Air Acts. The sky was leaden with no sign of the sun burning the smog off. Choices had to be made - go with the original plan and hope for the best as it wasn't raining nor cold or wait until next week. So today it was and we drove the hour to the gardens. Out of Derbyshire into Nottinghamshire and then we paid our toll at the toll plaza on the bridge over the River Trent. 40p each way for the few seconds drive. One side Nottinghamshire and the other Lincolnshire. Flat as a pancake this is pig country. Big porkers housed in small sheds in very large fields alongside the road.

The car park for Purelands proved to be a field to the side of the garden, a little damp when we arrived but not muddy although I guess it could be on a wet day or in the middle of winter. The entrance was through an old dilapidated barn. Windows blown in and a sign suggesting that children were very welcome but not if they played in the sand or made noises as this was a garden of tranquility and peace. On the face of it the place looked very run down and it was hard to imagine that there could be a beautiful garden hidden away behind all the falling down buildings.

We were greeted by the owner and garden maker Buddha Maitreya dressed in drab grey monks clothing but with a smile that lit up the otherwise dull day. He was born in Handa in Japan and had dabbled with Christianity as a young man according to his leaflets . He had found himself on a meditation course which led to his "enlightenment". He studied Buddhism to MA level and dabbled with life as a Zen monk. However thankfully he found this too restrictive and so moved to Thailand, India and Nepal and then to England where he gave us this wonderful garden.

He wanted to create a peaceful, beautiful area and in 1980 he began to create the garden from a flat field. Looking at it now it is hard to believe it ever could have been flat as raised areas are built up all over the garden and sunken areas filled with still and running water. Stones were brought in from a Derbyshire quarry and positioned. This was rockery building on a grand scale . Conifer trees were planted but all pruned into the most fantastic shapes. This was topiary but not as we recognise it in Britain. None of the animal shapes we had come to love or hate. Instead branches that branched and crossed in wierd and fantastic shapes. The British gardener would have pruned and cut out the errant and badly mishapen branches to encourage the tree to grow straight up. Here the straightness was cut out and the branches that swung down were encouraged. All trees including forsythia were pruned in such a way that they wept rather than grew towards the sky. Larch were trimmed this way with areas at the middle of the tree bare and green at the ends of the branches as big as dinnerplates. The ponds were bridged by dainty Japanese bridges, carp swam in the water. There were the signs of Bearded Iris and Laburnam or Wisterias to come. Buddha sat contented in private little corners that you found by accident. Bamboos were shaped into fantastic forms and stone lanterns completed the picture. Stone paths and steps forced you to follow them and find hidden corners or brought you to vistas over the ponds and rills.

We sat in a Japanese Tea house, under a bamboo shelter and virtually had the garden to ourselves. The only sound was of birdsong. Perhaps on other days the garden would be busy but today it was virtually empty. Two cars on the car park when we arrived and a few more when we left.

Another unusual feature of the garden was an indoor crystal garden reputedly the one in Great Britain, Blue stone made up the river element , green and brown the paths and grasses and glass reflected our images threefold around the room. Not to everyones taste I guess but interesting nevertheless and included in the admission price so it would have been unkind not to look in and see what was there.

We ended the visit with welcome sit down in a very plain and functional cafe area which doubled up as a reception/welcome desk and a place to display books on Japanese gardens and gardening, tapes of Buddha Maitreya's relaxation and meditation techniques and of his poetry. We ordered tea and scones served by the Buddha himself - an affable man who made his own scones. Delicious they were too, browner than normal as if made with a wholemeal flour but incredibly light and spongy. Cut in half, one half covered in jam and cream and the other maple syrup and cream and served on traditional blue and white Willow pattern plates. The menu was small just tea and coffee to drink and for food only the scones or a traditional rice salad with japanese dressing but people I guess tended not to stay for big lunches. The garden would take up to an hour to wander round so a cup of tea or coffee and a scone was an ideal foodstuff to serve.

This is a garden that would be interesting next week when the tulips flower, there was the promise of their buds. In a month when the cherry trees blossom and take over from the camellias and during the summer months when the summer bedding comes out. It is possible to visit in the evening for candlelight nights and in the winter when the hoar frost covers the statues and plants. Each visit would be different, show different aspects to the garden and show a whole different array of plants.

Hong Zicheng wrote " The colours of the flowers and leaves wordlessly teach us the truth of the world " and after visiting this garden it is a sentiment I can wholeheartedly agree with.



A very different start to our 2014 year of travel and how nice it was to finally get away from the housework and get on the road again albeit just for a trip a few miles from home. .

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