Surprises

Sometimes you stumble across things that just make you open your mouth in awe. This garden was one of them. While my father was here we had a day where I had no classes, but no real plans so we set off randomly in the direction of a small town called Ajimu where our only real plan was to check out a private garden that I had seen very briefly on T.V. that morning. Thanks to the car navigation we managed to make it there with only a couple of u-turns (it was in the middle of nowhere...) and wandered into someone's private garden, called out and asked if it would be okay to have a look around and were told to go ahead... which we did .... and wow! It was a HUGE garden in which everything was beautifully sculpted. I gradually gained more information about the garden as the day went on and it turns out that it is actually a fairly modern garden - made by a husband and wife team who started making it after the husband retired from his teaching job. I'm not sure exactly how many years ago they started it, but it was fairly amazing. What I loved about it was that, unlike most Japanese sculpted gardens, it was designed to walk through. Every path you took led you to another little path and another little area, there were places to sit and areas of wilderness that were in the process of being changed into new garden areas.
Unfortunately the husband had just started his lunch break when we arrived so I didn't get a chance to talk to him or really thank him properly, but it is definitely a place I want to go back to again - there is no entrance fee so I think next time I'll take them some baking to thank them for creating a great place to wander around. You could see how much they love what they do. Another place I would highly recommend to anyone in the area.