64 Ajiyials of Hortiailtu?'e. 



the taste which takes expression in dwarfed forms, miniature 

 mountains and streams has no doubt been largely influenced 

 by the cramped conditions under which the people live. The 

 40,000,000 people in Japan are huddled together on about 

 20,000 square miles of country. This one fact throws light on 

 many otherwise inexplicable features of their agriculture and 

 horticulture. It explains why the land is nearly everywhere 

 worked b}^ hand. The farms, or rather gardens, are too small 

 to support beasts of burden in addition to the people. It ex- 

 plains the laborious, painstaking care with which ever}^ foot of 

 soil is worked and cropped twice and often three times a year. 

 It explains the industrious gathering and saving of fertilizers, 

 and the almost miserly economizing of space for all purposes. 

 It has made the Japanese a nation of horticulturists. The 

 whole cultivated area is one vast garden. This fact, too, is 

 no doubt also a leading cause in the dominating taste for 

 dwarf forms in ornamental trees. Their pleasure gardens, 

 often only a few yards square, did not afford room for free- 

 growing trees, and what thus had its origin in necessit}^ has 

 become a national characteristic. In their fields and culti- 

 vated patches there is no space especially dedicated to vege- 

 tables, as with us. Their peas, beans, greens, radishes and 

 yams grow side by side with wheat, barley and other grains 

 which would here be denominated field crops. The irrigated 

 rice alone cannot be classed with the garden crops, as it is 

 often grown over extensive tracts of low-land to the exclusion 

 of everything else. 



''The garden proper is a flower and pleasure garden alto- 

 gether. This enclosure either surrounds the house or in most 

 cases, in towns and villages, is situated back of the house, and 

 is very generally fenced by a hedge. It is crowded with dwarf 

 trees or low shrubs, has usually a lake or small pond, or at 

 least a basin in which water plants are growing, also a more 

 or less tortuous stream crossed by a bridge, an artificial 

 mound, a stone lantern and perhaps a grotto, all arranged 

 with much skill. The writer has seen all this in a garden twenty 

 feet square. These same features are dominant in all cases. 

 The rich man's garden may be larger, even park-like, but we 

 find the same attempt to imitate nature by artificial mounds 

 to represent hills, and lakes, streams, grottos and the land- 

 scape adorned with the favorite trees and shrubs, with bridges, 



