British national creates Sikkim’s first moss garden at Rumtek

GANGTOK, 14 May: Sikkim has got its first moss garden at the Jawaharlal Nehru Botanical Garden in Rumtek, some 24 kilometres to the south-west of Gangtok courtesy Robert Pompey who hails from Britain.
A press release informs that Mr Pompey arrived in Sikkim in January 2011 and contacted the Department of Forest, Environment and Wildlife Management to offer his services on a voluntary basis. Since then he has worked tirelessly, 6 days a week for 15 months to create this moss garden.
As Mr Pompey will leave Sikkim at the end of this month, Forest Minister, Bhim Dhungel, along with Addl PCCF, Dr Anil Mainra and various officers from the Department of Forests visited the Gardens in Rumtek on Saturday to view the progress and thank Mr Pompey for his efforts, the release informs.
The garden is built around a 20m x 20m rock graphic phyllite outcrop: the garden itself is some 40 m square.  It contains no man-made materials.  Stones used to create the paths and steps are secured by weight and clay alone, and path walls are built from discarded vegetation and secured by live vegetation roots.
The mosses (Bryopsida and Lycopodiopsida spp) have been collected mostly from within or around the Botanical garden. Other seedless plants (eg Marchantiomorpha (liverworts), Anthocerotophyta (Hormworts), Polypodiospida (ferns etc) and some local grasses (Poaceae) and orchids (Orchidaceae) also feature in the garden.
The garden would be maintained by regular hand weeding by the Department as it is important that the soil is disturbed as little as possible since the mosses require a solid, undisturbed surface on which to germinate, the release mentions.
According to Mr Pompey, with careful weeding maintenance, the garden would reach full viewing maturity in 2014. The Minister thanked Mr Pompey for his efforts who in turn thanked the Department for the support and patronage.
The use of mosses to create gardens has been a Japanese tradition since the feudal era (12th -19th centuries). Even a thousand years ago, Zen Buddhist monks wrote of the mosses in their temple gardens. In modern-day Japan, private homes, restaurants, and shopkeepers often maintain small moss gardens, especially where they can be viewed from within the building. Moss gardens are known for their serenity, emphasizing simple shades of green with only occasional colour from shrubs or other flowers. Mosses are used to miniaturize the landscape, giving the feeling of distance. In Japanese culture, a green garden, unlike ephemeral flowers, symbolizes long life and offers a place for relaxation and contemplation. In sharp contrast to the myriad of colours and shapes in a traditional American or European garden, the moss garden allures with its subtle shades of green, accented here and there with a rock, a bamboo fountain, or perhaps an occasional small flowering shrub.