Zen and the Art of Zen Gardening

This Zen garden was an idea that I got a few months ago when my friend Brooke (and his partner Megan) got me a Lions Head Maple (Acer palmatum "Sishiashire") in exchange for my helping him develop his Christmas tree farm. You would think that constructing a Zen style garden would be a soothing, Zen like experience. There are a few notable exceptions to this in reality.
First off, I now have a time frame for completion. I'm having a backyard wedding (my own) on July 22, and the missus would like the yard to look nice. This creates time constraints, as I'm still working away from home. But this entry is a testament to what you can accomplish on a one day weekend if the sun is shinning.

Another non-Zen thing about my Zen gardening experience was the rather large dump truck that showed up at my house one sunny Saturday morning with my 8 yards of drainage rock (that’s ¾ inch gravel for those of you out there who’ve never gotten a load of rocks).

Beeping, belching diesel exhaust, and dumping a load of gravel onto the road in front of my house, the gravel people shattered the morning calm. My neighbours think I’m weird anyway, so I didn’t care too much. But the transport of all that gravel from front to back is an onerous task. Some could argue that the 80 some odd wheelbarrow trips could be considered meditative. These folks would be wrong.

Pain in the lower/upper/middle back and arms/shoulders blocks one from achieving Nirvana.

There is also lots of digging involved. Sod must be removed, and the removed sod and dirt must be put somewhere. In the past three years I’ve dug a lot of holes, and made some pretty big piles of debris tucked into corners…some would call them hills….but I’m running out of room.

Levelling the pond was frustrating, but even less Zen was the fact that when I back filled the hole with gravel, one of the corners of the pond liner buckled. Fortunately the lovely flat rocks that I gathered this afternoon cover this flaw. Actually gathering those rocks was kind of Zen. I have this source of natural materials where I get most things for my yard. It’s actually a large eyesore of a cut block off the highway into town, but it provides stones, shale mulch and foxgloves. Sasha always likes to run around, and it’s one of those places that reduces the number of doggy bombs in my back yard.

Another non Zen experience was breaking one of the solar lights while trying to stick it into the ground. Apparently you are not supposed to push on the head, or the part that screws into the post will buckle. A quick repair job got it back together, although it is not perfectly straight. My mantras on this project (and all projects) tend to be expletives....not so much chanting as muttering.

So that was my one day weekend of Zenscaping. Thank/praise Allah/God/Buddha that the sun was shinning.