276 How to Make a Flower Garden 



I have already located some shrubbery that will be transplanted. At the 

 top of the steps a torii will invite entrance, and I will have a stone lantern 

 — a real ishi doro, even if it has to be made to order. I know just what 

 trees to plant for blossoms, and a little pond in a sunken tub will 

 hold some water-lilies. 



"I'm sure to find a unique little boulder to set up somewhere, and it 

 will be the easiest thing m the world to get earth for a little mound hill. 

 There will be double windows, and in the days to come I shall sit in 

 Buddha-like contemplation of pleasant things, and great serenity shall 

 settle upon my soul." 



As one enters the garden there is first an open, level, sanded area, its 

 irregular limits surrounded by small grass-plats, ponds, and the more stunted 

 vegetation, with the bridges, tea-houses, and larger trees farther back, and 

 many paths with earth-cut steps up the grades that rise from the sanded 

 area to several parts of the higher grounds. A wistaria projects beyond 

 the eaves of the tea-house, and trellises for vine are of bamboo, supported by 

 posts six feet high. Against the rear wooden wall of the garden rises a 

 receding tier of heavy wooden shelves, from which grow many varieties of 

 dwarfed pines in porcelain pots. 



The original pines in the garden, still erect in their natural symmetry, 

 are stripped, one by one, of their Californian simpHcity and taught to wear 

 the art of Japan. Each tree is studied by the quiet gardener. Its possi- 

 bilities as a part of its surroundings are carefully worked out and it is put 

 to torture. Its young limbs are racked and its back bent until it is trans- 

 formed into a creature of weird fantasy. A well-rounded young pine tree 

 must be cultivated and cropped; its hmbs must be bent and altered, lopped 

 off on one side near the top and on the other near the base, until it looks 

 as aged as a veteran of the hilltop after the buffeting storms of years. 



Fancy grooming the foliage of a pine tree ! Yet this very thing is done 

 by boys in the branches, who pull out the old leaves till only fresh green ones 

 remain. Here they saw a branch to let in light and a shapely patch of blue 

 sky, and there thin out the twigs to leave a fret of pine needles against an 

 azure ground. Likewise eff'ective vistas are opened up through the scraggy 

 pines. The limbs of the trees, on close inspection, are seen to be twisted 

 and braced to produce the picturesque. Each gracefully reaching branch 

 in the training is often splintered with bamboo and tied fast with numberless 

 hempen strings. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree, and its large branches 



