A Long Way Round 



One chief aim in the garden is to make your plot 

 of land seem larger than it is. Therefore, when you 

 have laid out your ground so as to deceive your- 

 self and everybody else, except those who pass over 

 it in a balloon, you can considerably heighten your 

 triumph by conducting your visitors by a zig-zag 

 path. Decide on a given point, and go there as 

 indirectly as possible. There is so much for your 

 visitor to see by the way that he (or she) will never 

 perceive the trick and will go away dreaming of a 

 vast estate. . . . The Japanese have a dodge of 

 reducing everything to scale so that, to pass from 

 the fish-pond to the tea-house, you have to circum- 

 vent a mountain, traverse a perilous gorge and 

 thread through a forest, while, in your sober senses, 

 you are perfectly aware that it is really no more 

 than one stride. A Japanese garden is a cut-and- 

 dried symbol which, no doubt, saves trouble, but 

 it must curtail the scope of invention and originality, 

 and even sometimes forbid the use of the material 



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