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Lucy Stewart, "The Japanese Garden: Ella Christie and Cowden" (Birlinn, 2026)
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- [00:01]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [02:35]
Lucy Stewart Stewart
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Lucy Stewart Stewart, who has written a book Published by Berlin in 2026, titled the Japanese Garden Ella Christie and Cowden, which takes us about a century or so back in time roughly, to focus on the adventures. And really they were adventures of Ella Christie, who went all over the world, but started off in Scotland and came back to Scotland, where amongst other things, she built a Japanese garden, which is really interesting. It's kind of one of the only Japanese gardens like this generally, and it's certainly the only one of this size and scale that was not only commissioned by a woman, Ella Christie, but designed by a woman, Taki Handa as well. So this is a really interesting story in many ways of adventure and travel and globalization, but without sort of, you know, the way in which all of that is done in the 21st century. It was pretty different a few decades ago to undertake these sorts of adventures. So we've got a lot to discuss. Lucy, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [03:53]
Lucy Stewart Stewart
No, very nice to be here, Miranda, thank you very much for having me.
- [03:56]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? I mean, what was so fascinating about Ella that you wanted to write a whole book about her?
- [04:06]
Lucy Stewart Stewart
To be honest with you, slightly by chance that this has happened, I. I married a man called David Stewart and Ella Christie was his two times great aunt. When I first married into his family, I was rather unaware of her. There are various sort of family portraits stuck on the wall, but those things happen in this sort of area and I didn't really take much notice of them. Every so often somebody would say, well, let's go have a walk up at the Jappy garden. And I think, okay, fine. And we go off to this place which had a smallish lake in the middle of it and was massively overgrown with huge rhododendron ponticums which swamped everything. There would be the odd piece of wood sticking out, which I was told used to be a wooden structure, a tea house or something like that. And I'd look at it and think, hmm, okay, I'm not sure I'm getting this. But gradually in time, as I grew to know more about my in laws, it seemed to me that this was becoming a bit interesting. And when Sarah, my sister in law, began the restoration of the garden in 2014, I suddenly felt that Ella was a woman who actually deserved to have a greater audience. She was fascinating and extraordinary and I began to read up about her. And for me I found out that she'd been to a lot of places that I've been to in the world because I've traveled a lot and she'd seen a lot of the things that I had seen but 100 years before and it became a bit of a project. She was an extraordinary person and it wasn't until I started reading her various letter diaries which she wrote back to her sister Alice, which I kept in the National Library of Scotland, I realized that more and more I just got drawn down into the rabbit hole, that was what she was saying. And it sort of, you know, I began to sort of look more and more for stuff about her in the Internet. So, you know, Sarah then said to me, well, why don't you write the book? We need a book. We need a definitive history. There are various bits and pieces out there which have small inaccuracies in them and sometimes larger inaccuracies which need to be put straight. So that's basically what happened.
- [06:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I always love hearing the backstory of books, so thank you for that introduction. Can you tell us a little bit about more about Ella in terms of her family background and childhood. Childhood before she goes off traveling?
- [06:33]
Lucy Stewart Stewart
Certainly. She was born in a well to do family. Both sides of her family were pretty wealthy. Her mother and father. Her father was John Christie. He made all his money in the iron industry in Scotland in the late 1800s. And her mother was a lady called Alison Christie. She was the only child of a lady called Margaret Caldwells who made a bad marriage. Her husband, it turned out, was a bit of a gambler. And then he died shortly after she'd married him, leaving Alison. And in the aftermath of that, Alison and her mother, Margaret went to live with Margaret's wife brother who was called John, another John. And John ran a gunpowder manufactory not far, a little bit south of Edinburgh in, in the Midlothian area. John had made quite a lot of money out of his gunpowder and Margaret, his sister, became his housekeeper because he never married. And therefore Alison, Ella's mother, grew up in a stable house which was fairly wealthy. Everybody worked quite hard and eventually she met John Christie who was a coal working in the coal industry in that area. John was always very keen on Alison. She always said no, she couldn't possibly marry him because after her mother died she took over running John Caldwell's household and she needed to look after him. But in the end she did give in and she married him in 1859 when she was 41 and John Christie was 35. They had three children in pretty quick succession. There was the oldest son, John, and then Alice and then Ella. John, the brother, Ella's older brother, died age 12, and the whole household was sort of plunged into Victorian style mourning. Everybody wore black, obviously, everyone was very distraught, but they kind of got over that. And John and Alison, being very cultured people, introduced the girls from an early age to music and reading. They were both only children, therefore Alice and Ella sort of were treated as mini adults, right from the word go, and expected to contribute to conversation. They were expected to read widely, understand things. They both learned how to play piano and sing because they were surrounded by music, which both their parents really loved and there weren't many other adults around. Therefore theirs was a very sort of adult view on life. In 19, sorry, 18, John Christie moved and bought himself an estate called Cowden in 1965. He moved there because he was a very keen arborealist and trees grow extremely well in that area due to high rainfall, actually very good soil for them. So he expanded the property that was on that piece of land and made it basically into a castle. And it was huge and it was full of art. He collected a lot of porcelain from the continent. It was a typical Victorian, somewhat cluttered house. There were many staff. There was very good quality bed linen. There was beautifully beautiful decorations. It was very well appointed. The girls didn't go to school. They were homeschooled by a series of governesses. They had a Swiss governess initially who taught them to speak fluent French. She also taught them German, they had rudimentary Spanish. And then subsequent governesses brought them on intellectually. They were expected to do maths, they were expected to write. And I think being treated as a mini adult, probably their intellectual development would have been, I don't know, less, less, less childlike. Maybe being asked what you thought about things from an early age made you think about them more. Because as, as they got older, you know, you become aware that these are two very intelligent women. They write well, they question what they're seeing, they're being exposed by their parents to all sorts of different cultures and as a result, they are possibly more inquiring than other ladies of their social level. They also had, were brought up to have a great feeling of duty. It's your duty to contribute to society, it's your duty to give back and it's your duty to help people who are less well off than you are. So from an early age they were required to contribute to charitable events. They could choose which ones they wanted to support and they would help run bazaars where things were sold, homemade things on behalf of charities that they thought were interesting. There were many servants around, they had lots of ponies, There were dogs. They both learned how to drive a pony and trap. It was a life of great privilege. It was one also full of travel. And maybe this is where Ella's initial love of travel came from, is that her parents took her abroad to Europe every winter. They would leave Cowden and they would travel on the train down to London, which was an excitement in itself because it was so different to what they were used to on a very daily basis. London was huge. They went on the Underground, which in those days was driven by trains with steam and smoke, which they found pretty disgusting because it was in tunnels. They loved the shops, the hotels were big, the dining rooms were huge. There were buses being pulled by horse and carts. It was fascinating to them. And then they would go down to Folkestone, they would get on the paddle steamer over to Boulogne, there would be another train journey off to Paris, and Paris was just sort of emerging at that point from a Franco Prussian conflict, and Paris was still being rebuilt. So, you know, it was an interesting time to be in Europe. And I think then, having gone all the way down to Cannes, which is where they overwintered, they would settle into the community there. As Ella grew up, she would play the organ or harmonium at the church services on the Sundays, there were picnics and other standard entertainments, and then they would come all the way back to Scotland again for the rest of the summer season. So it was a very, very privileged, happy upbringing, outdoorsy, quite simple pleasure sometimes in that, you know, the day might be spent with the gardener learning how to graft plants and how to cross pollinate things to produce new varieties of plants, which is maybe not what your average child did. So, yes, it was a good. It was an intellectual upbringing, one full of interests, but it, I think, also left them with a very real understanding that at their level of society, they needed to contribute to society in general and give something back, because they were the lucky ones.
- [15:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that certainly does sound like a very privileged childhood. But if all Ella did was travel back and forth between Scotland and France, we probably wouldn't be talking about her in terms of, like, big adventures that wasn't that unusual for the time. Even, as you said, kind of. That journey would certainly have lots of intriguing things about it. So when and how does Ella start to begin traveling much more broadly?
- [15:32]
Lucy Stewart Stewart
It really starts after her parents died. So another slightly sort of interesting aspect of it is her father suffered from something called Pernicious anaemia. And he had his first attack in 1887. It's a blood disorder. He was seriously, seriously ill and it left him a changed person in the sense that before he'd been very fond of his wife, he'd been very family orientated and all of a sudden he just wasn't. And one of the trips that Ella and Alice and Alice's husband, Robert Stewart, took him on was to Norway and Sweden to try to give him a different place and maybe relax and a holiday. Change of scene. But when they were there, they got this telegram saying that Alison Christie was now dangerously ill and John just wasn't moved by this at all. So Robert Stuart took him back to Scotland and Alison, Ella followed more slowly. And then Alison died, which again left John Christie completely unmoved. So in another attempt to maybe give him a change of scene, Ella and her friend Ms. Hall decided that they would take John Christie out to Egypt, which is an area that he'd been very interested in. So off they went. And about three weeks into the trip, John Christie decided he would go home. So he went home in a departure, Ella just said, I'm not going home. This is an area of the world I really wanted always to have a look at. So she and Ms. Hall carried on, on this trip and they visited Syria. They had an interesting time in Jerusalem. And I think that first trip, seeing caravan camels coming in from Baghdad loaded with all sorts of exciting things, visiting the church, the Holy Sepulcher, and seeing all the different branches of Christianity fighting to keep. I mean, I don't know if you've ever been there, but it's a strange place where all the different Christian sects have carved off their own sections of the church and sort of never the twain will cross. And in Ella's description of that, nothing has changed. When I was there two years ago, it was all exactly the same. There was still that friction between the different branches of Christianity. So she loved that. And having got back clearly, you know, in the back of her mind, she. She felt that there were other trips to be made, but she still had this seriously ill father. And then he died. He died in 1902. And instead of that being a great relief and a release, she discovered that actually he had decided to leave all his money to a couple of orphanages for orphaned girls who, in his vision were going to be taught to be domestic servants, and that Alice and Ella were to get no money from him at all. And the first they knew of this was when somebody knocked on the Door of the house in Edinburgh, which is where they were, because John just died in the house to tell them he was coming to do an inventory of all the contents of it because it was no longer going to be theirs. They had no idea this was going to happen. And again, because I think Ella was a woman who felt that you do right by me and I will do right by you, and that this was not right, that she was going to fight it, I think Alice was a bit more reluctant about it. But, you know, Alice was fine because she was married to Robert Stewart, who was a wealthy man. But Ella had very little income. If she didn't have any, if she didn't inherit anything from her father, she just had a small income from monies left in trust by her, for her, by her uncle John Caldwell's, the gunpowder manufacturer. So for her it was fairly crucial that she didn't lose her inheritance. Therefore, they challenged the will in the High Court on the basis that they were saying that John Christie was not in the right state of mind when he wrote about the third of several wills that he wrote in the period after his first attack upon Miss Anemia. It went backwards and forwards. There were several witnesses who had all testified that John Christie's character had changed markedly after his illness. And eventually it was decided in favor of Alice and Ella that they would receive the inheritance and John Christie's last series of wills would be put aside and everything would be sorted out on the first will that he ever made, which was made before his illness. Now, the girls were not, you know, again, as I said, they had great a feeling of duty towards society, so they didn't totally strip the orphanages of all possible income and they left with them with enough money to carry on doing their work. But it did mean that Ella inherited the castle at Cowden and she inherited a block of money from John's Christie's World. So she was now financially independent. She was also independent of looking after her father and therefore was free to make more big journeys, which she did. And the first one she did was two years after John died, when she set off for the Indian subcontinent.
- [21:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, these are some pretty big journeys. That's the first one, but there are a number after that. So can you give us a sense of kind of a few of the places she went to and especially sort of, how did she decide where to go? I mean, these weren't all popular travel destinations of the time, right?
- [21:57]
Lucy Stewart Stewart
No, they weren't. I suppose the Indian one was. Was fairly standard. After all, we've Been going backwards and forwards to and from India for a couple of centuries by then. The other ones, she hasn't. I haven't found any. Any. Anything that gave an explanation as to why she chose the places she did. You know, she'd read widely, possibly when she was in India visiting sort of Sri Lanka or the Malay States up into Tibet and things. There was always that thing with her that she would go somewhere and then she would. She would do what kind of everybody else was doing, but she would then do a bit more because that was what really interested her. So it is possible that she had conversations with people in India. There's a lot of trade going on between the various parts of the British Empire, so India to Hong Kong to China, it's not such a big leap. It could have been a chance conversation. I have no clear idea about that. But she was always fascinated and she was always talking to people. So it could well have been that somebody sort of said to her, well, you know, Central Asia is an interesting place. You've been to Istanbul, go down to Istanbul, go a bit further. So it was always, go a bit further. So you can go to Istanbul, but then, hey, there's a boat going across to Batoum and then you can get a train to Baku, and then you could go across the Caspian Sea and end up going up to Ashgabat and Merv and on as far as you can go. So every so often she would meet the end where she couldn't go any further because she wasn't allowed across the border or something. It just became far, far too difficult. But for her, if you put something in her area, she'd look at it and she'd think about it and she'd think, well, why not? And it was interesting. Always, always a. Always questioning, always curious. She was very curious about things. And possibly that curiosity drove her on, as it does, I think, with a lot of explorer types, it's, you know, what is happening around there? Why don't I go and have a look? And because she never let herself be daunted by things, you know, some of the privations she underwent when she was doing these journeys are fairly extreme. But it didn't stop her because I think she always had a view that she would get there in the end, or she. This could be solved, she'd work it out. And so she did. And so off she went.
- [24:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, can we talk about some of those things? She had to solve some of the either physical or sort of logistical challenges that she faced in doing this?
- [24:58]
Lucy Stewart Stewart
Yeah, well, if we sort of. She was a great one for finding somebody for opening doors. I think I've come to the conclusion that she must. She had enormous personal charm. I think she didn't suffer fools gladly. But if you put her anywhere, like on a boat going from London to Hong Kong, by the time she got to Hong Kong, she would have talked to everybody on that boat and as a result, she would have got a whole bunch of invitations, not just at the landing point, but onwards. So if you were on a boat, say from Marseille to Bombay, by the time she got to Bombay, she would, as I said, would have talked to everybody. All those people have gone back to their various postings throughout India and she would have looked them up or they would have said to her, oh, there's a race meeting today, why don't you come along? So she'd have gone along to the race meeting, she'd have talked to people and that next person would have said, I'm going to such and such. Why didn't you come with me? Come and meet so and so. And through that, as I said, because she had this great personal charm and, you know, from reading what people said about her, have you sat and chatted to her? Within a couple of minutes you would be her best friend and she would be yours. And that ability to get on with people, I think, is really, really useful and really helpful when you're trying to get from A to B. So, you know, having arrived in Bombay and wondering how you're going to get down to Sri Lanka, well, you ask people, you ask people you've met, you've asked people who live in the area who can help you. And with a couple of letters of introduction, all of a sudden the next, the next phase in your travel is sorted. And, you know, often these letters of introduction came from people she hadn't really ever met before. So if she was in modern, she was in Tbilisi, for example, and she had an introduction to, say, some governor tyke in Tbilisi, then she would ask that governor Tigan Tbilisi, to write her a letter to the governor in the next province. And she wasn't shy in knocking on the door and handing in that letter of introduction. And then, you know, I'm sure if you were the governor in a sort of rather distant province in India, and you got this new person coming into town saying, hi, I'm here, you might want to go back to them and say, hi, how nice, come and have supper. And so, you know, doors would kind of open, but she was very good at pushing on those Doors in a way that you didn't annoy people and resulted in them welcoming her, you know, into their. Into their circle.
- [27:39]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
She definitely does sound like quite a character. Do we have a sense of what of these travels she was sort of most struck by, for instance, in the letter she sent back to Alice, I
- [27:51]
Lucy Stewart Stewart
think various things struck her. She's very, very interested in the cultures of the places she went to and very interested in observing everyday life. So she would, again, she would visit, say, the Ladies Quarter. The only place she didn't get into was. Was. Was the harem in Bukhara. But pretty much everywhere else, she somehow managed to get in there. And she would talk to these ladies with the aid of a translator. She would find out what their lives were like. And various things did appall her. She was very struck by the way Chinese women had their feet bound, which they still did in the time that she was traveling. She occasionally would comment on how hard life was, for example, the religion. One comment she made struck me was some, that there was something lacking in the religion of Muhammad that can condemn women to such a life as is led even in the house of an enlightened Sartre merchant. So, you know, she's very aware that her life compared to the life of a woman in a Muslim household back in those days was. Was not easy. But she was aware, and she was aware how hard everybody worked, how. How it was very difficult to keep body and soul together. She was very aware of all the cultural things going on around her. She was particularly struck by when she found herself in Port Arthur, which is now Lushun. The Russo Japanese War had only just finished and the whole town had been pretty much flattened by the Russians. And she was shown around by the adc, the Japanese general who she had met. And to see the destruction, to see how the rebuilding was going to take such a long time, to see the abandoned forts and the guns, you know, that brought it home to her a bit. And then her maid Humphreys, who was another fairly doughty individual, had an appalling accident where she was thrown from a cart when the horse bolted and she landed on her head. And it sounds to me like she was very, very badly concussed. But Ella had to deal with the aftermath of this. So that again, brought her up against the fact that she needed to get a permit to get Humphreys into the Red Cross hospital. And having done that, she was faced with a Japanese doctor with whom she could barely communicate and the level of medical care was. Was not great. So then she sort of Thought, well, you know, poor old Humphries, she's been a great. I don't want her to suffer anymore than this. So it was a train journey to the coast. It was a three day boat to Korea to get to the American hospital where she felt that Humphreys might get decent treatment. And every so often she'd be struck by something like a Russian engineer who'd been staying in their hotel in Port Arthur came down to the, to the docks when he, he knew that she was leaving with a big food parcel because there was no food available on these boats and she was going to be, she and Humphreys were going to want be on it for three days. So she, she said the kindness of people occasionally the. And I'm thinking about. You mean you're going on a food, a journey where there's no food and you've got to sort that out. It, she was very much thrown onto her own devices in a lot of different situations which she, she seemed to rise to the occasion in a way that I find truly impressive. You know, I traveled through China in the mid-80s and often you'd be, you'd be provided with this enormous menu which had lots of lovely sounding options on it. But the only, there was only one thing actually available and often it was pretty disgusting and you would just have to eat it. And for her it must have been even worse because, you know, in those days things were even more backwards and even more difficult. But you know, she dealt with it and then contrast that with the experience that she had in Shanghai which, where there was the foreign legation, where everything was actually really very, very well organized, it was very comfortable. She said the Japanese ran everything terribly slickly. She was terribly impressed with that. And yet you contrast it with the native city where she said, you can't believe the filth and the deprivation and the fact that it's very small alleyways all totally crowded with porters with big baskets on long poles over their shoulders shouting for people to get out of the way and the filth, but also the fun things to buy. And she was such a magpie. She would, she loved something, something unusual that she could ship home to Cowden. With the result, the Cowden was actually packed full of the most extraordinary, eclectic collection of bits and pieces. But she loved it and she loved the bargaining and you know, she was sort of never happier when she'd found a piece that she wanted to buy and she was bargaining with the local chap who was selling it. So it didn't matter whether it was a Chinese man or whether it was somebody in Samarkand. And it didn't really seem to matter whether they understood each other or not. Somehow they understood each other. She would make herself understood, which is a real skill because some people just fall apart when they're face to face with a foreigner who doesn't speak their language. But for Ella, it just seemed to be a bit of a challenge and enormous fun. And so she. She sort of came alive in those situations and the filth kind of didn't bother her, which I. I find is extraordinary for a woman of her background where, you know, you would almost. You would expect her to be not so comfortable in such base, you know, base surroundings, but she was. And that is another thing that, for me, makes her an interesting person, that the contrast between her very privileged, comfortable life in Scotland to sleeping on basically, floorboards in some complete hole in Manchuria, and the fact that Humphreys was also dragged along on this journey and, you know, was equally highly fascinated by it.
- [34:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yes, very different indeed. And obviously the idea of collecting and bargaining and sending things back to Kaudin starts to kind of answer some of these questions of how she ended up with a Japanese garden.
- [34:51]
Lucy Stewart Stewart
Right.
- [34:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
We've explained kind of why and how she went as far away as Japan. She loves sort of bringing things back, but it's one thing to sort of bargain and purchase a particular item. It's another to create a full garden, right? We're not talking about sort of 1 square meter, like, it's pretty big. So why did she decide to create a Japanese garden at Cowden? And why choose Taki Honda to make it?
- [35:14]
Lucy Stewart Stewart
Well, I think you, you know, you've hit on something there. It is easy just to buy something from stall, and it's just completely different game to build a Japanese garden. You must remember she. She was very determined as well as being charming and getting. Getting out there. She was a determined lady and she loved the gardens that she saw in Japan and she loved the fact that there was. I mean, the thing about Japanese gardens is that nothing is there by chance ever. So it might look like it's just happened, but it hasn't just happened. Every rock, every tree, everything is very carefully done and very carefully placed. And I can remember spending an afternoon watching five gardeners in one of the big three Japanese gardens in Okayama, it's called Kurakuen. And these five guys, one of whom was the head guy, one of them was sitting in a boat on the lake and they were sorting out, positioning a pine, and one of them would Pull the branch down 6 inches and then move it slightly to the right and then you get an instruction to move it slightly to the left. And it really was a question of down a bit, up a bit, sideways a bit. It would then be tied in place with black twine, thick black twine, and there it would be left for the next three years or so to lignify totally. But this was a process that was taking hours. But it meant that this pine would be in a particular shape for the rest of its life. And that shape was crucial to the whole look of the particular area in which these gardeners were working. And that, I think, was what Ella was seeing. And, you know, her comments on an ikebana demonstration that she watched while she was out there basically said, I don't quite get this, but I get the fact that through snipping off that leaf there and moving that branch three inches that way, the whole look of it is perfect. But that perfection is a very difficult thing to achieve in a Japanese garden. But she loved it. So she started asking around while she was out there, how, how could she do this? And she thought, well, if it's feasible, I'll bring somebody home to design it for me. And she wrote to a chap called Josiah Condor while she was still in Japan. And he was an expert that had been brought over by the Japanese government to help Japan move more into the modern world, to move it from a sort of Japanese feudal style country into one that was more in line in step with other, other countries around the globe. And that included the architecture, the laying out of Western style parks in, in Tokyo, for example. And Josiah Condor was brought over by, by the Japanese to advise them on this. He, like Ella, fell in, fell in love basically with, with Japan. He actually married a Japanese dance instructor and he never went back to the uk, but he wrote a book about Japanese garden design. And Ella wrote to him and said, how can I do this? And he gave her a couple of pointers. But at the same time, she had got to know a lady called Florence Duquesne who she had met on the boat going out to Hong Kong. And Florence and her sister, also called Ella, were out in Japan while Florence was doing a book on, she was an artist. She was painting a lot of scenes of Japanese gardens and wisterias and the cherry blossom season and all that sort of stuff. And she had developed a network of sort of contacts in Kyoto where Ella Christie went and stayed with her. So Ella Christie was introduced by Florence Duquesne to a lady called Mary Dentist who was an American missionary who had taught at the Doshisha Women's College in Kyoto. And, you know, I pieced this together from Ella's various letters, but what I think happened is that Taki Honda had been studying at Doshisha as well. And she had been. Taki had been introduced to a family called the Le Boutilier family, who were great plant collectors and Takihanda had helped them collect plants and acted as their translators. So she was known to Mary Dent. The Le Boutelier families are paid for, tacky, to go and study horticulture at Studley College in Warwickshire. And my theory is that Mary Dent said to Ella Christie, I think you should get in touch with Taqui Honda because she's in England anyway. She knows about design and horticulture and I think she could help you design your garden if that's really what you want. And so Earla Christie got in touch with Tachihander directly while Tachyhanda was in Warwickshire and said, would you ever consider, would you come up and have a look? And Tachyhanda did. So it sort of, you know, the stars were slightly aligned because I don't think Ella Christie was at that time ever going to get a Japanese gap, a garden designer to come over to England just to do that. She really did need somebody to find somebody who was in Europe. And as the. I think at that time there were probably only about 500 Japanese people living in the UK. It was a bit like a needle in haystacks. I think the stars were aligned and. Yep. So Takihanda came up to Kowden to look at the site, to make some drawings, to have a little think about it. And then she came up on two subsequent visits to oversee Ella's estate workers while they did all the earthworks, the hard landscaping. And she was very hands on. She was, she was trying to help them because it just wasn't what a traditional English sort of garden would be. It was very different and it required a certain amount of reconstructing because they needed to block off the waters flowing from the spring to make the lake, because it is quite a big area, it's seven acres. So it was never going to be a little Japanese garden with a few twisted pines and a, a sort of bridge. It was going to be a strolling garden and she wanted to use the background of the Ochill hills behind the site and pull the whole lot together so that as you're walking around this seven acre site and the lake, you would be seeing the hills behind and they would be part of the garden and yet not part of it. So they were a bit borrowed landscape, which is quite a challenge.
- [42:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. The book has lots of photographs for anyone who wants more visuals of what we're talking about. What were the reactions like when this was all done? What did people think of this Japanese garden in Scotland?
- [42:53]
Lucy Stewart Stewart
I mean, it was a private garden, so it wasn't like a, you know, public park where everybody could go and see. Was very much for Ella and her friends. She did used to open it to any charitable cause if you wanted somewhere to take your, your patrons to see something different. And it was for a charity. Ella was absolutely up for that. She also used to. There's a certain piece in a Japanese garden which you don't get with an English style garden. English style gardens are very busy. There are a lot of flowers, there's a lot going on. A Japanese one is much plainer. And they are, particularly in the early morning and the early evenings, there's a calm to them which Ella instantly recognized. Once the garden was finished and after the First World War and actually the Second World War, often groups of veterans, shell shocked veterans, would come to visit because the piece was so beneficial. So in that sense the reaction to the garden was very strong. And obviously local people would come and visit it too. But it was never really a public space, not as such. You know, it's more now since the restoration and it is a public space that I think wider, a wider world has, has realized what she achieved. But at the time, because visitor numbers were relatively small, it probably wasn't that that well known.
- [44:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, obviously, as you mentioned, that's different now. So let's talk a bit about the restoration and the garden today.
- [44:47]
Lucy Stewart Stewart
Yeah. So Ella obviously never married and so my father in law, Sir Robert Stewart, who was always known as Bobby, he inherited her estate. He also inherited the estate of Alice's son because he never had children either. So my father in law took possession of the garden. He kept it under control. He did as well. He allowed lots of charitable groups to visit it and use it. And it was, you know, it was a great. It was as I said, that the family used to use it a lot. In 1963 it was vandalized by some pupils, some students from the local school. And they burnt down the tea houses, all the structures. They pushed the stone lanterns into the lake. The whole thing was, you know, it was ghastly. And my father in law never really had the money to repair it. So gradually it sort of became overtaken by all the rhododendrons, you know, the azaleas, everything just sort of, it totally went to potential is where I saw it. And over the years Bobby had always sort of wondered whether there was some way that it could be restored, but somehow you ran out of energy. And I think it wasn't until he said to Sarah, right, you can have this, you can make it what you want, on you go. And Sarah has like Ella has enormous energy and she by chance she was contacted by Professor Fukuhara who works at Osaka University, who had designed an award winning garden at the Chelsea Flower show and had been involved in restorations of a couple of other Japanese gardens in the uk. He phoned up and said, I've heard about this garden, can I come and see it? So Sarah said, well yeah, of course, there's not much here, but do. So he came up and he had a look around and he said, I think we should restore it. And Sarah said, right, you're on. So he estimated it would cost £50,000, which unfortunately turned out to be rather on the low side. So at that point Sarah decided that it would have to become a charitable organization because again, she didn't have the money to pay for more than that. And becoming a charitable organization enabled her to apply for various grants and money has come from not only government guards, but from private philanthropic organizations. And that has enabled Professor Fukuhara and his team to come over about once a year. They would come over for a few weeks, everybody would work like heck and they would finish another part of the garden. Various structures were, were built and it is now pretty much complete. It is also, I mean Ella would absolutely recognize, is slightly different in that she had a fishing hut and a boathouse on one side of the lake, whereas we've got a pavilion which is, it's different but it is very much in keeping. Otherwise. I think the only other structure that is there now which wasn't there with Ella is the Christie Lodge, which is a two bedroomed lodge which is available for as an Airbnb, but it's built very much in a Japanese, Japanese style. Obviously it has to conform to British building regs, but it sits very well and overlooks the pond. But you have a beautiful 7 acre site which is. Visitor numbers are limited because I think if we had allowed too many then it would swamp it and you wouldn't get that very special feeling of peace and serenity which is so key to the whole experience of visiting it. It's, it's a, it's a very, very special place. And I do urge people to. To go and go and see it because I don't think my descriptions really do it justice. But the photographs in the book, I think, do they give you a very, very good, clear faith, a flavor of what it is. It's very unique. It's particularly unique. You know, it was the vision of one woman, it was the construction by another. It was also maintained after Takihanda went back to Japan, it was maintained by Professor Suzuki and Shinsaburo Matsuo, both of whom are Japanese nationals living in the uk. So it is a very, very. It's a very. It's a very Japanese thing, not just a sort of, oh, I don't know, an homage to Japaneseness in the corner of a British garden, put it that way.
- [50:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, the book does, as you say, have lots of photographs of the garden, as well as loads of detail about kind of what you were able to dig out of the letters and archives of Ella's various adventures. So. So lots of fun things for readers and listeners to explore there. So for anyone interested, a reminder, the book is titled the Japanese Ella Christie and Cowden, published by Berlin in 2026. Lucy, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.
- [50:41]
Lucy Stewart Stewart
No, absolutely, absolutely. My pleasure. She was an amazing woman. It was a pleasure to do the research. There is so much more in there, which I didn't have time to do it because I started reading it in Covid and you were only allowed so many hours in the reading room at any one time. And I would get there and I would get out this box and I get these letters and you disappear down the rabbit hole. And then suddenly there was somebody tapping on my shoulder saying, time's up, you got to go. And I'd be. I mean, what? What? And then I think, well, I haven't had lunch, you know, what she was saying was just so amazingly fascinating. And probably, you know, there's another couple of years worth of reading to be done. To be honest, at some point I might get. Well, I hope I'll get round to it because it's fun.
- [51:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It definitely sounds intriguing. So thank you for taking time away from the boxes to speak with us and give listeners a sense of Ella Christie.
- [51:37]
Lucy Stewart Stewart
Yeah, my pleasure.
- [51:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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