202 THE BAMBOO GARDEN CHAP. 
clumps of Iris Keempferi. It was wrong, it was heterodox, it 
almost broke my gardener’s heart. For if there are laws, 
sacred, immutable, as to the disposal of a few flowers in a 
vase, how much more is the laying out of a garden a matter 
not to be lightly tampered with! And yet when the iris 
came into bloom the following year, even the greatest 
sticklers for precedent among my Japanese friends were 
enraptured at the beauty of an innovation only pardonable 
in a barbarian. 
The secret of the success lay in the massing of the plants 
—another lesson learnt from Nature, but nowhere better 
taught than in some of those lovely valleys of Mongolia 
which lie beyond the great wall of China. I was travelling 
in those regions in 1866. I knew nothing, but my comrade 
was a good botanist and ardent lover of flowers, and I can 
well remember how he kept jumping off his horse, as it 
seemed to me every few yards, to gather some precious rarity. 
We must have trampled treasures under foot which I, blind 
bat that I was, should have ridden past uncaring and un- 
thinking but for my friend. Yet, ignorant as I was, it was 
impossible even for me not to be struck by the picturesque 
and bold grouping of the flowers with which the valleys were 
enamelled. Nature had laid on her colours from a rich and 
generous palette. I can even now call to mind a great isolated 
crag some five or six hundred feet high, standing out from the 
mountain wall, on the summit of which, by efforts little short 
of miraculous, a small Buddhist temple had been made to 
perch. Every cranny and fissure of that great mass of rock 
seemed to be filled with lovely flowers and ferns, and at the 
base was a flame of scarlet Turk’s-cap Lilies growing by scores 
