April 30, 1890.] 



Garden and Forest. 



219 



structive essay with which Mr. Howe has prefaced the book. 

 Modestly called an " introduction " it is in fact a masterly little 

 sketch of the history of gardening in which many authors are 

 quoted who have no place in the body of the book, while the 

 historical significance of those who have such a place is 

 made clear. Especially interesting are the passages which 

 explain that different styles of gardening have developed since 

 the seventeenth century although we are accustomed to mass 

 them together under the general name of the " naturalistic " 

 style ; and also those which lay stress upon the progress of 

 the art in recent days and the greater difficulty of the tasks 

 laid upon the modern designer as compared with those of his 

 predecessors. " The ends of the earth," says Mr. Howe, 

 " now contribute a wealth of plant life adapted to useful and 

 ornamental tree and shrub-culture and to decorative horticul- 

 ture. Their habits and relative value in a landscape effect, or 

 in a garden, must be familiarly known and felt by an artist 

 who may be called upon to make studies for a lodge in Scot- 

 land, a villa at Cannes, or a park in Australia ; who may be re- 

 quired to bring back the primitive verdure to the banks of 

 Niagara, to preserve the natural beauties of the Rockies, or to 

 plant the plains with the forests they can and should be made 

 to support. The rich flora of China and Japan have now been 

 acclimated in Europe — and even more successfully in America 

 — and the enormous number and variety of trees, shrubs, 

 herbaceous and other plants now added to the resources of 

 gardening call for correspondingly greater learning and train- 

 ing than has ever before been given to the subject, so that 

 the accomplished landscape artist of to-day is as far beyond 

 the Kents and Le Notres of the seventeenth and eighteenth 

 centuries as they were beyond the topiarius who tortured the 

 trees and shrubs of Pliny and the Caesars." 



Nothing could be more judicious than the following remarks 

 with which our brief notice of this delightful little book must 

 close: " Two qualities which usually distinguish professional 

 from amateur productions in art — namely, simplicity and 

 breadth of treatment — are especially important when applied to 

 the face of Nature itself. True, Nature will, in course of time, 

 protect herself from the misguided assaults of well-meaning 

 amateurs by covering up or wholly destroying their abortive 

 exertions. A trained artist, on the other hand, knows how to 

 assist Nature without resorting too bluntly to the easy device 

 of servile imitation. In such work, particularly as now taught 

 and practiced, there is produced an impression of repose and 

 well-balanced composition that is suggestive of natural effect 

 and yet satisfactory as a work of art." How true this is, yet 

 how constantly does the public admire a beautiful park for its 

 " natural " charm, forgetting the fact that there is nothing like 

 a park in Nature, and that it requires the very highest artistic 

 skill to produce one which shall look as though Nature might 

 have formed it. 



Periodical Literature. 



The most attractive articles in recent numbers of the Cen- 

 tury Magazine have been three, written and illustrated by Mr. 

 John La Farge, called "An Artist's Letters from Japan." The 

 series will be continued, and promises to give the untraveled 

 reader a more vivid and fresh idea of the land of Chrysanthe- 

 mums than has hitherto been given in our language. The 

 most interesting chapter thus far published appeared in March. 

 Text and pictures are equally delightful, and together they 

 emphasize various points with regard to the Japanese treat- 

 ment of landscape and plants which, in a balder fashion, have 

 already been suggested to our readers. For example, the 

 benefit that a beautiful view derives from some sort of fore- 

 ground framing is admirably shown in one of the pictures 

 where tall trees on steep banks draw close to the road, and it 

 is spanned by a torii, through which the approaching eye 

 perceives a wide plain, and as the centre of the picture a 

 group of low buildings and trees. A torii, it should perhaps 

 be explained, is composed of four bars, two set upright and 

 two running across near together at the top, the upper one be- 

 ing curved with the concave side up. "This assemblage of 

 four lines of stone or wood or bronze," writes Mr. La Farge, 

 " is to me one of the creations of art like the obelisk or the 

 pyramid. Most impressive, most original of symbolic en- 

 trances, whether derived from sacred India or from the ances- 

 tral ignorance of Polynesia, there is something of the begin- 

 ning of man, something invented while he lived with the 

 birds in this elementary porch, whose upper line, repeating 

 the slope of hill and wave, first embodied the curve that curls 

 all upper edges in the buildings of the farther East. . . . Look- 

 ing through a torii one is sure to be in the direction of some- 

 thing sacred, whether it be temple or shrine or holy mountain. 



Neither closeness nor distance interferes with this ideal inten- 

 tion, and the sacred Fusi-yama is often seen a hundred miles 

 away in the sky, framed by these lines, built for the purpose." 

 Well may the writer say that " the Japanese sensitiveness to 

 the beauties of the outer world is something much more deli- 

 cate and complex and contemplative, and, at the same time, 

 more natural, than ours. Outside of Arcadia I know of no 

 other land whose people hang verses on the trees in honor of 

 their beauty, where families travel far before the dawn to see 

 the first light touch of the new buds." Of the forests along the 

 traveler's way, he says : "Sometimes there were traces of en- 

 closure about these woods ; sometimes they had no edgings 

 but their own beautifully modeled contours. Long ages, re- 

 spectful care, sometimes fortunate neglect, have made of 

 these reserved spaces types of an ideal wildness, for these are 

 sacred groves, and they are protected by the divine contained 

 within them. This preservation of a recall of primeval nature, 

 this exemption of the soil from labor, within anxious and care- 

 ful tillage, is a note of Japan constantly recurring and a source 

 of perpetual charm. ... As the evening came on we crossed 

 a large river and looked down from the height of the 

 new bridges upon the discarded ferry-boats, and upon the 

 shape of a more fantastic one that was never meant to 

 sail — a Pine-tree, shaped and trimmed, spread its green 

 mast and sails in a garden by the water." The famous 

 avenue of giant Cryptomeria, twenty miles in length, 

 that leads to the shrines of Nikko has often been described 

 before, but these touches of detail show a true artist's eye : 

 " Where an occasional habitation or two or three are niched 

 in some opening, the tall columns of the great trees are inter- 

 rupted by spaces filled with crossed branches of the wilder 

 Pine, and behind these, outside, sometimes the light green, 

 feathery mass of a Bamboo grove. Against the bank stood 

 low thatched buildings ; near them the great trees were often 

 down, or sometimes dying; an occasional haystack, sliced off 

 below by use, was fastened in thick projection around some 

 smaller tree. Once, at a turn of the road near a building with 

 a wide roof pushed against the corner-bank, out of a basin 

 fringed with Iris sprung in the air a little jet of water. Near 

 by a solitary ditcher had placed in a Bamboo fence some 

 bright red blossom, with its stem and leaves, apparently to 

 cheer him at his work." The picture called " The Waterfall 

 in our Garden" is most interesting as showing how keen is 

 the Japanese sense of fitness and harmony in gardening 

 design. How often do we see Weeping Willows where they 

 look badly themselves and hurt everything about them ! So 

 often that we have been tempted to feel that there can be no 

 way of placing them well. But look at this picture and we see 

 that in the lands whence they originally came they are charm- 

 ingly employed. Here a narrow and very drooping one stands 

 on a bank just beside the top stones of a little caspade. The 

 falling water and the falling branches repeat one another's 

 lines, and each feature gains by the presence of its neighbor, 

 while behind the Willow lower trees of more normal shapes 

 do not stand inharmoniously erect, but bend to form a sort of 

 little arch above the waterfall. 



A few weeks ago we noted some words of Mr. Charles Dud- 

 ley Warner's, comparing the Rose and the sentiment it 

 breathes with the Chrysanthemum, which, to his eyes, seems 

 a mere showy, heartless and unpoetic plant. It is amusing to 

 learn from Mr. La Farge that a Japanese might very well 

 speak in just the opposite way of these two flowers. When 

 he "smelled for the first time the fragrance of wild Roses, 

 looking like ours but a little paler," he says : " This was the 

 first thing which reminded me of home — the Roses that the 

 Japanese do not seem to care for, do not seem to understand. 

 With them the Rose has no records, no associations, as with 

 us, for once on this side of the garden of Iran, the Peony and 

 the Chrysanthemum, the Lotus and the Iris, the Peach, the 

 Cherry and the Plum make up the flower poetry of the extreme 

 east." 



Recent Plant Portraits. 



PHAJUS Cooksoni, Gardeners' Chronicle, March 29th ; a 

 handsome new hybrid, with nankeen-colored flowers, flushed 

 with pink, raised from Phajns Wallachii and P. tnberculosus, 

 the former being the seed parent. 



Citrus Japonica, Gardeners' Chronicle, March 29th. 



Begonia Adonis, Revue Horticole, April 1st; a new winter- 

 blooming hybrid of French origin. 



Botanical Magazine, April : 



Prestoea Carderi, t. 7108. 



SlCANA SPHERICA, t. 7109. 



Peliosanthes albida, /. 7110. 



