Oriental garden, originally uploaded by malyousif.

The plinth is built and Buddha is gracing it with his presence. I’m glad that this phase is over now, the basic construction and infrastructure. Now I can really concentrate on the plants and to bring it to life.

The observant amongst you would have noticed yet another name change to this patch! It is now officially “The Buddha Patch” which I think is much more appropriate and gives me a bit more flexibility as to the overall theme I want to adopt for this area of my garden. It will still be “oriental” in nature, but because of the unavailability of appropriate plants and material to that end in Bahrain, I shall strive to maintain at least the atmosphere of a Japanese/Oriental theme.

Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

In-progress and overhead pictures after the break

A couple of things I really came to appreciate today: the first is the wealth of information available on the Internet, again, and the second is those manual labourers who we continuously take for granted!

The story is this: I wanted to build a regular red-brick column/plinth in the Zen Garden onto which I would place my newly acquired Buddha. I brought a builder to survey the site this morning and he quoted me a reasonable labour charge of BD30 (about $110) for the complete job without materials. He also agreed that he would finish the job in one day, but I thought I could do the thing on my own, not to save money, but because I thought it would be simple enough.

That brings me to the appreciation of the Internet as a simple Google search presented me with this article which included a video and sufficiently explained what needed to be done. Simple enough and convinced even more that I could take up the job on my own, I came home and started working on the plinth with the aid of my son Arif, bless him. He got to appreciate that being wrenched from in front of a TV is not a very nice experience!

Following the instructions, I built a 50cm square wooden frame, dug a hole to accommodate the frame at at a depth of approximately 50cm, mixed the cement and filled in the frame to create the base. That was a simple enough process to do, what wasn’t is the time-factor. It took us about 90 minutes to accomplish this simple task and the amount of intensive labour required was unexpected. I didn’t think that simply mixing the sand and cement to make sludge was that back-breaking. Nor did I expect that wet cement was that heavy either!

Anyway, we finished the task by nightfall and I am leaving it now to set and solidify. Hopefully tomorrow or the day after I can start laying the bricks to create the actual plinth. I should finish the job completely and take a few pictures to show you the new addition to the Zen Garden by the weekend.

What I thought I would do as a rockery, demanded to be made into a Zen/Orental garden instead! Don’t look at me, it all started with the devil getting into my sub-conscience and demanding that I get some bamboo for the background.

The only place I knew I was to get that bamboo was from Jannusan Exotics and that trip resulted in not only getting some tall Yellow Bamboo, but also Dwarf Buddha Belly Bamboo too along with a volcano lamp and a sitting Buddha statue!

At the apex of the plot I planted some asparagus and in front of and to the sides of the lamp I planted red penisitum grass and finished off the first phase of planting with a nice moderately sized agave to give a contrast in texture and colour.

I must say that I am rather happy with how it is turning out so far, even with the dire warnings by my wife that the bamboo will uncontrollably spread and it would be a murderous exercise to remove it.