Have you got any old carved stone statuary or ornate metalwork adorning your garden? You might want to take a closer look if you have, because you never know, you may just be sitting on a small fortune. Bronwyn Hickmott, of Exeter in Devon, recently used a semi-circular carved stone as a door step until it was identified as a rare Buddhist treasure.
Bonhams experts identified the stone as a step was in fact a Sri Lankan Temple Moonstone (Sandakada pahana) of the late Anuradhapura Period, 10th or early 11th Century.
Bonhams described the stone:
of semi-circular form, depicting a series of carved bands containing from outer edge, a band of forked tongues representing fire, a repeating band of animals representing the four corners of the earth – the elephant, the horse, the lion and the bull, a band containing a raised and delicately carved wavy vine on a dense bed of curling leafs, a band of swans plucking vegetation, the far left swan with head turned away and facing a three-tiered votive or vase and the far right swan with its head raised, a band of water lily petals their ends curled upwards and to centre a half lotus flower 246cm x 123cm; 14cm thick at widest point
The stone was expected to fetch £30,000 but bidding eventually sold for £553,250 at London, New Bond Street auction house.
After starting my garden maintenance and landscaping business in 1984 and running it for 21 years I decided I needed a change of direction (probably a mid life crisis, no seriously! :-0) Together with my family, wife Donna, Son Henry and Daughter Fleur (not forgetting Hector the Black Labrador) I moved to France in search of an old farmhouse to renovate. In the interim period whilst waiting for the contract to go through I started writing a blog. Initially just to keep a diary for family and friends to keep up with our progress if they wished but then it occurred to me that there isn’t a real time watcher of the landscape industry in the UK. I didn’t want to waste my experience and experiences so I decided I could put all of this Juice to good use so I started Landscape Juice.
Source: Landscape Juice – Buddhist Garden Treasure Sells for Over Half a Million Pounds
