264 AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY. 



distributed favourites of the indigenous flora. A little cemented 

 basin or trough is made just in front of this group of rocks, where 

 the water is collected, and near by grows the Giboshi {Ftinkia 

 ovata, Sprengel), its bluish green leaf-tufts covered in late summer 

 with spikes of beautiful bluish white flowers. 



The narrow paths which wind through a Japanese garden of this 

 kind are paved with one row of stone slabs, in which all regularity 

 of form is avoided. There is no attempt to make the edges even. 

 Potted plants of the popular dwarfed varieties take the place of 

 borders on both sides. 



Japanese art-gardening is carried on with very few implements — 

 and these few but poorly adapted to their purpose — but with great 

 manual skill. It does not compare with European gardening 

 in perfection of taste and execution, nor in the ways and means 

 which are at the command of our gardeners. It must be re- 

 garded, however, as a sample of Japanese taste, just like some 

 specimens of their art industry. Our gardeners have learned with 

 great care the requirements of all the plant-life in their domain, 

 and seek by fulfilling these conditions to bring all to their highest 

 natural perfection. On the other hand, the Japanese gardener 

 tries to keep all bushes and trees constantly pruned and trimmed, 

 and in many other ways to obstruct their natural development ; 

 now to produce symmetrical forms, after the fashion of old French 

 gardening, and again to prevent symmetry by fanciful creations, 

 dwarfed and deformed figures, and to work in a way utterly incom- 

 prehensible to us. There is now-a-days a tendency in Europe to 

 imitate this sort of gardening in its quaint artificiality ; but it is 

 not according to our taste, and only admissible in exce"ptional 

 cases. Our gardeners help nature ; the Japanese do her violence. 

 But Japanese gardening is praised in many books, just for this 

 unnatural tendency, while to us it appears like incomprehensible 

 trifling and waste of efl"ort. 



Dwarfing or enlarging one part at the expense of the other, 

 variegation and cultivation of every accident or trick of nature, 

 are, as has been intimated, the careful occupation of the Japanese 

 gardener. He distinguishes himself in these eflbrts, and even be- 

 comes, in one or the other, a specialist. He works with great 

 enjoyment to himself, and knows also that he is pleasing the taste 

 of his customers, among whom he counts not only the educated 

 and the rich, but also the ordinary labourer. 



The Japanese not only take great pleasure in this artificial de- 

 formation, but they admire and collect also natural malformations 

 of every kind. They admire a stone, e.g., through which water has 

 worn a hole, or an old decaying tree-trunk with one or more plants 

 growing out of a knothole where seeds have been accidentally 

 lodged. This is due to the same intellectual laziness, and is an 

 example of the charm which striking phenomena have for many 

 people with us also, and which the uneducated admire every- 



