Dartmoor in southwestern England is an extensive national park of open skies and wild moorland. Granite rocks, peat bogs and heather characterize the land, where wild ponies run free. When Okehampton, a small town on the edge of Dartmoor, was planning a new hospital, garden designer Tsutomu Kasai of Japan was asked to create a garden "healing center" in the hospital grounds. Kasai received maps and plans of the hospital, photographs of the moor and the local trees and landscape. He asked for 2,000 stones to be brought from an Okehampton river. He would use them for a path. He wanted a naturally shaped basin of granite from the moors. He would make a water feature of it. Valuing local character, Kasai made his design to epitomize the nature of Okehampton and Dartmoor.
The Okehampton Center for Health found Kasai through a British medical officer who visited Japan a few years ago. The doctor visited the Hakone Museum of Art, where he admired the serene beauty of the moss and curving lines of Mokichi Okada's garden. He envisaged a similar garden to benefit the Okehampton community, and to gladden the patients in the projected health center. He asked Sekai Kyusei Kyo for help.
This society, with bases in both Kyoto and London, was founded in the 1920s by Okada, an artist, healer and spiritual leader. His philosophy teaches that nature, beauty and healing together comprise the art of living. When the society approached Kasai, he was working on the Heian Kyo Sacred Grounds in Kyoto. In a voluntary capacity he accepted the new commission in England, and drew in 15 more volunteers from Japan. The team lived and worked last year in Okehampton, laying out the healing garden and commemorating in it the memory of Okada.