February r, 1893.] 



Garden and Forest. 



49 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office : Tribune Buiujing, New York. 



Conducted by Professor C. S. Sargent. 



ENTERED AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER AT THE POST OFFICE AT NEW YORK, N. Y. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY i, 1893. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Editorial Articles : — A Seventeenth Century Garden 49 



The Love of the Japanese for Particular Flowers 5° 



The Ginger-beer Plant Professor H. Marshall Ward. 50 



The Coast Dune Flora of Lake Michigjan.— II E. J. Hill. 51 



Notes on the Forest Flora of Japan.— III. (With figure.) C. S. S. 51 



Foreign Correspondence: — The New Plants of 1892. — II W. Watson. 52 



Cultural Department: — Irises and their Cultivation. — VII J. N. Gerard. 55 



Autumn-fiowering Lilies. — II G. Reuthe. 55 



Some American Bulbs P- H. H. 56 



Grevillea robusta George C. Butz. 56 



Correspondence: — A New Plant Label. (With figure.) y. N. Gerard. 57 



The Old Hedge-rows on Long Island IVill. 11^. Tracy. 57 



Meetings of Societies: — The Western New York Horticultural Society. — I.: 57 



Address of the President William C. Barry. 57 



Prevention of Apple-scab Professor S. A. Beach. 58 



Bird Notes for Horticulturists Walter B. Barrows. 58 



Notes 59 



Illustrations : — Cercidiphyllum Japonicum, in the Forests of Yezo, Fig. 9 53 



An English Plant Label, Fig. 10 57 



A Seventeenth Century Garden. 



EARLY in the seventeenth century, and not long- after 

 leyasu by the selection of Yedo for the Shoguns' 

 capital made it the most important city in Japan, the Prince 

 Mitsukuni laid out within the borders of the city a garden 

 in vi'hich to find, after a life of labor, a peaceful old age. 

 This garden, which has been maintained in an excellent 

 state of preservation, is one of the most interesting sights 

 of Tokyo; and, in view of its age and the purity of its 

 style, is certainly one of the most remarkable and instructive 

 pieces of landscape-gardening in existence. Korakuen, as 

 it is called, forms a part of the grounds connected with the 

 Koishikawa Arsenal, and English-speaking travelers in 

 Japan know it as the Arsenal Garden. 



In conception and design this garden is Chinese, for the 

 Japanese, with their other arts, brought many centuries ago 

 the art of landscape-gardening from China where what w^e 

 call the natural style was conceived and brought to a high 

 state of perfection long before it was thought of in Europe. 

 In Japan several examples of good Chinese gardening art 

 exist, all dating from the early years of the seventeenth 

 century, notably the Garden of the Golden Pavilion con- 

 nected with the Rokunji Monastery at Kyoto and that of 

 Ginkakuji in the suburbs of that city, although none of 

 them compare in simplicity of design and preservation 

 with the Arsenal Garden at Tokyo, in w^hich, probably, 

 the gardening art of China can now be studied better 

 than in China itself, where many of its best examples 

 have been destroyed during the last fifty years or have 

 been allowed to fall into ruin. 



The Arsenal Garden occupies, perhaps, twenty acres of 

 ground, although it is so skillfully planted that its area may 

 not be ten acres or it may be fifty ; of the shape of the 

 piece of ground it covers the visitor can form no idea what- 

 ever. In reality it is a parallelogram, rather longer than 

 broad. The garden is entered through a small and rather 

 shabby outer garden of the prevailing Japanese fashion. 



with the pond of dirty water surrounded with its irreg-ular 

 semi-rustic stone coping and filled with plethoric part- 

 colored gold-fish, with the Box and Holly plants cut into 

 fantastic shapes, the masses of closely clipped Azaleas and 

 Enkianthus, the piles of moss-covered rocks as full of 

 associations to the Japanese mind as they are meaningless 

 to ours, with the artificially moulded surface of the ground, 

 the contorted Pine-tree, the unhappy-looking Apricots, and 

 the leafless Cherry-trees. This dreariness and unnatural 

 monotony serve, however, to intensify the pleasure which 

 the visitor feels as soon as he passes the simple gateway 

 in the high masonry wall which surrounds the inner 

 enclosure ; then he finds himself in a broad walk paved in 

 the middle for a wadth of five or six feet, with flat, irregu- 

 larly shaped stones raised a few inches above the surface, 

 the whole being constructed in imitation of that portion 

 of the Tokaido, the great sea-coast highway of Japan, 

 which crosses the pass in the Hakone Mountains. This 

 path winds gracefully through a grove of Live Oaks, 

 Camphor-trees, Camellias and Hollies, and in the hottest 

 day of summer affords a retreat as cool as a grotto. 

 On either side the ground rises and falls in natural un- 

 dulations and is covered under the trees with a thick 

 carpet of evei'green plants, Aucubas, Aralias, and many 

 Ferns ; ascending and descending as it-crosses the undula- 

 tions of the surface it reaches the shores of a lake at a point 

 where the broadest and most perfect view of the garden 

 is obtained. Here the lake, made in imitation of a famous 

 sheet of water in China which occupies perhaps half the 

 area of the garden, can be seen in all the simplicity of 

 its design surrounded by what appear to be high hills 

 clothed to their summit with an unbroken mass of ever- 

 green foliage through which here and there the tall spire 

 of a great Fir-tree stands out boldly against the sky. 

 The w^alk now leaves the border of the lake, and, cross- 

 ing a small lawn, passes by a tea-house, and, plunging 

 into the woods, rises and falls sometimes steeply, at others 

 gradually, as it leads the visitor around the borders of 

 the garden ; now it comes to a point from which a vista 

 has been cut through the trees for a view across the 

 lake ; now it passes a miniature reproduction of the 

 temple of Kiyomizu at Kyoto, and then by a shrine 

 which commemorates the glory of two Chinese brothers 

 famous because they preferred death to disloyalty ; then 

 across an arching stone bridge to an octagonal shrine, so 

 formed in allusion to the eight diagrams of the Chinese 

 system of divination ; and then over a rushing torrent 

 which falls with a high cataract into the lake, and by 

 other lawns finally reaches the point where the shore of 

 the lake was first approached. The wonders of this walk 

 are its mystery and quiet, for while it is perhaps not more 

 than half a mile long, it appears, so varied is it in inter- 

 est, to extend for miles, and, in the midst of a great city, 

 it seems to climb the hills and to cross the ravines and 

 streams of a primeval forest. 



The Arsenal Garden occupies what was once probably 

 a perfectly level piece of ground. The soil, taken from 

 the site of the lake, was heaped up around the borders 

 to protect them and to diversify the surface, and then 

 the water which fills the lake was introduced at the 

 highest point of the artificial hills and allowed to fall 

 naturally in a series of cascades ; the natural grouping 

 of a few varieties of harmonious trees did the rest, the 

 whole producing a result so quiet and perfect that a 

 visitor standing on the shore of the lake might well 

 imagine himself a thousand miles from any human habi- 

 tation. The little tea-house w^here guests are refreshed, 

 the shrines and temples, the bridges and the other struc- 

 tures which make the walk through the garden interest- 

 ing, are all hidden and do not intrude upon the harmony 

 of the scene. 'And hidden, too, are the special collections 

 of plants which add to the attractions of the garden with- 

 out disfiguring it as a work of art. At one point the 

 principal walk passes through a little grove of Apricot- 

 trees dear to the hearts of all Japanese, for the flowers 



