Wednesday 7th June

Look who has flown into the garden, well not quite, the boddhisattva came in a van yesterday.  Remember the  story of the Buddhist who sacrificed himself to feed the tiger and her cubs, well here he/she will reign here,  at the end of Paul's Japanese shady side strip in the garden.

There is one more thing we need and that is water.  We have been looking at  half wine barrels and the largest might do.  I miss the dragonflies and damselflies that hovered round the ponds in Bath, my son and I had dug out two ponds.  The first quite deep and I remember putting the pond lining in half folded one evening, and next morning when we came to lay it out there was a couple of newts already in waiting!  Watching the larvae of the damselfly mutate into beautiful winged creatures was a great joy.  The other pond was shallower and larger, goldfish multiplied in its mirky depths, till one day the dog chased a cat across it, and then the water disappeared, to be turned into a bog garden after that.  I surrounded the ponds with reeds that already grew in that part of the garden, because at one point in its history there had been a stream running through the valley and a bridge in our part of the Victorian garden..  Also a medieval mill at the lower end of the valley, and when a great pipe was dug along the valley, they uncovered the walls of of the leat and dam.

Wiki entry;

"In Buddhism bodhisattva is the Sanskrit term for anyone who, motivated by great compassion, has generated bodhicitta, which is a spontaneous wish and a compassionate mind to attain buddahood for the benefit of all sentient beings. Bodhisattvas are a popular subject in Buddhist art."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Something slightly different, another woman artist. Jessica Hallyata. Again decorative and pretty but have you ever seen her work?  maybe the paintings of flowers are too domestic ;)

Here is her dad, from whom she got her talent along with her sisters - polite cough here as to the first reference I found for her was male ;)

Elizabeth Hallyar