Trees, mosses and stones were collected from around Japan resulting in wooded grounds covered with a variety of gardens, complete with raked sand, designed by the landscape gardener Soami.
Unfortunately we didn’t get to see much of the main building, which is being renovated (the work should be completed by spring 2010), but I was totally blown away from the time we walked through the main entrance, between magnificent high hedges lining both sides of the approach to the temple.
Once inside the temple courtyard, the first thing you run across is the Ginshaden (Sea of Silver Sand), where a perfectly smooth cone of sand is supposed to represent Mount Fuji, and from there, following the pathway, you eventually end up looking back over the city of Kyoto.
The notes in my journal read don’t write, just show pictures though I can’t leave the subject without mentioning that I particularly loved the moss. Until that Sunday, if I thought of moss at all (and I rarely did) I regarded it was an odd green substance that you occasionally find growing on rocks in pools and other damp environments, probably rather attractive if you liked that sort of thing, but nothing really to write home about.
After the sight of the very important moss alerted me to the variety of mosses they were actually cultivating to fit into the gardens I emerged with some (probably totally unrealistic) ambitions to incorporate moss into the grounds around the Little House of Concrete.