June 25, 1890.] 



Garden and Forest. 



315 



plants. These plants were expensive to keep through the 

 winter, and required great care, and produced, after all, an 

 effect which covered but a few months in the year, leaving the 

 spring and autumn garden bare and empty. The return to a 

 more natural style has brought into prominence these hardy 

 plants, many of which are quite as brilliant in foliage as the 

 bedding plants which they are replacing. We are by no means 

 confined, however, to plants which flourish in old-fashioned 

 gardens, for an increased knowledge has brought into cultiva- 

 tion hundreds of beautiful plants from all the temperate and 

 mountainous regions of the globe until there is abundant ma- 

 terial for beautiful floral effects, from the earliest spring until 

 freezing weather, to be had with these hardy herbaceous plants, 

 and while an ample variety of foliage and flower can be se- 

 cured to suit every soil and situation and individual taste, less 

 care and expense is required to cultivate them than is needed 

 with the artificial bedding system. 



The use of these perennials is not confined to the flower 

 border alone; many of them are adapted for use on edges of 

 shrubberies and in half wild situations so that large parks and 

 public gardens can hardly be treated with proper landscape 

 effect without using them in greatabundance. It would be hard 

 to treat rocky ledges, or shady nooks, or swampy lands, or the 

 banks of ponds or streams without them. 



Nurserymen were advised to begin at first with those that 

 are most easily cultivated and propagated, avoiding weedy 

 kinds and including in the main such as are of medium size 

 and a long flowering season and having abundant bloom. A 

 few of the taller kinds are indispensable for large effects, and 

 a few of the exceedingly dwarf kinds are equally indispensable 

 where a low creeping growth is needed. As a whole, no class 

 of plants is more easily multiplied, and the only propagating 

 apparatus needed is that found in the ordinary nursery busi- 

 ness. They take up little room, and a large variety can be 

 cultivated on a small area, so that the filling of orders is easily 

 accomplished, and the work of digging and packing is a small 

 item. 



Mr. Manning concluded with a list of the hardy plants which 

 were in greatest demand, but we omit it, as we give so much 

 attention to this class of plants from week to week. 



Periodical Literature. 



T N the fourth of his " Artist's Letters from Japan," published 

 -*■ in the June number of the Century Magazine, Mr. La Farge 

 speaks more particularly about architecture and gardening. 

 His chief text is the temple of Iyemitsu, which, like the more 

 pretentious one of his grandfather, Iyeyasu, stands on the 

 sacred mountain of Nikko. The purely architectural descrip- 

 tions, marked naturally by the keenest artistic feeling for 

 effects of light and shadow as well as for form and color in 

 themselves, do not here concern us as much as those which 

 show how inevitable in the Japanese mind nature and art are 

 treated as a single entity, and to produce beauty means to blend 

 the work of man in the most subtile ways with the work of 

 God. The temple in question, says Mr. La Farge, is " fitted 

 into the shape of the mountain, like jewels into a setting. 

 From near the red pagoda of Iyeyasu's grounds a wide ave- 

 nue leads, all in shade, to an opening, narrowed up at its end 

 to a wall and gate, which merely seems a natural entrance be- 

 tween the hills. There are great walls to the avenue which 

 are embankments of the mountain, from which at intervals 

 fountains splash into the torrents at each side, and overhead 

 arc the great trees and their thin vault of blue shade. The 

 first gate is the usual roofed one, red, with gilded rafters and 

 heavy black-bronze tiles, and with two red muscular giants 

 in the niches at the sides. Its relative simplicity accentuates 

 the loveliness of the first long court, which we enter on its 

 narrowest side. Its borders seem natural, made of nothing 

 but the steep mountain-sides, filled with varieties of leafage 

 and the columns of the great Cedars. These indeterminate 

 edges give it the look of a valley shut at each end by the gate 

 we have passed and by another far off disguised by trees. 

 This dell is paved in part and with hidden care laid out with 

 smaller trees." A cascade falling from the hill fills a large stone 

 tank and " the little pavilion over this well is the only building 

 in the enclosure. . . As we turn to the highest side of the court 

 on the left and ascend slowly steep, high steps to a gorgeous red 

 gate above our heads, whose base we cannot see, the great 

 Cedars of the opposite side are the real monuments, and the 

 little water tank upon which we now look down seems nothing 

 but a little altar at the foot of the mountain forest. The gate, 

 when we look back, is only a frame, and its upper step only a 

 balcony from which to look at the high picture of trees in 



shadow and sunlightacross the narrow dell, which we can only 

 just feel beneath us. . . . Just behind the gate, as if it lead to 

 nothing, rises again the wall of the mountain; then we turn at 

 right angles toward a great esplanade, lost at its edges in trees, 

 from which again the forest would be all the picture were it 

 not that further back upon the hill rises a hign wall with a 

 platform and lofty steps, and the carved red and gold frame of 

 a cloister with another still richer gate of red lacquer, whose 

 suffering by time has made it more rosy, more flower-like." 

 This is but the beginning of Mr. La Farge's description of this 

 shrine and its enclosures, but it is enough to show how nature 

 and art intermingle, interpenetrate each other under the hand 

 of the Japanese artist. More and more this impression is 

 strengthened as further steps arc taken through the varied en- 

 closure, until we reach " the distant steps leading through the 

 trees to the tomb. . . . surrounded by the still more solitary 

 splendor of the forest," its bronze and lacquer and golden 

 carvings contrasting with wild rocks and trees, grasses and 

 mosses, and, when the winter shall come, standing unpro- 

 tected amid the snow and storms. Such a scene, as the 

 writer says, brings a feeling of humility and of the nothingness 

 of man." It is as if these tombs said, " serenely or splendidly, 

 in color, and carving, and bronze, and gold: ' We are the end 

 of the limits of human endeavor. Beyond us begins the other 

 world, and we, indeed, shall surely pass away, but thou re- 

 mainest, O Eternal Beauty.'" 



With humbler buildings the effect is the same — their sur- 

 roundings form part and parcel of the design and it is impos- 

 sible to say where nature ends and art begins. "What is nat- 

 ural," says Mr. La Farge, " and what was made by man has 

 become so blended together, or has always been so, that I can 

 choose to look at it as my mood may be, and feel the repose 

 of nature or enjoy the disposing choice of art." Simplicity is the 

 note of gardening art — small gardens needing few hands to 

 keep them in order. Yet order means something much more 

 artistic and particular than with us. Each day in the small 

 garden near the writer's lodging "the gardener appears and 

 attends to one tiling after another, even climbing up into the 

 old Pine-tree, taking care of itas he does of the Sweet Peas; and 

 I recall the Japanese gardener whom I knew at our Exposi- 

 tion of 1876, as I saw him for the last time stretched on the 

 ground fanning the opening leaves of some plant that gave 

 him anxiety." It is pleasant to find that the estimate of the 

 Japanese point of view as regards miniature gardens, which 

 has more than once been theoretically explained in these col- 

 umns, is here echoed by a keen observer who has made prac- 

 tical acquaintance with them and their creators. 



The Japanese miniature garden, he says, "can be made of 

 very slight materials, and is occasionally reduced to scarcely 

 anything, even to a little sand and a few stones laid out accord- 

 ing to a definite ideal of meaning. A reference to Nature, a 

 recall of the general principles of all landscapes — of a fore- 

 ground, a distance and a middle distance — that is to say, a lit- 

 tle picture— is enough. When they cannot deal with the thing 

 itself — when they can they do it consummately — they have 

 another ideal, which is not so much the making of a real 

 thing as the making of a picture of it. Hence the scale can be 

 diminished without detriment in their eyes until it becomes 

 Lilliputian to ours. All this I take to be an inheritance from 

 China, modified toward simplicity." Mr. La Farge also notes 

 that these little gardens cannot be appreciated by us as they 

 are by the Japanese, "for they have in their arrangement 

 manners of expressing ideas of association, drawing them from 

 nature itself or bringing them out by references to tradition or 

 history, so that I am told they aim to express delicate mean- 

 ings that a Western imagination can hardly grasp ; types, for 

 instance, conveying the ideas of peace and chastity, quiet old 

 age, connubial happiness and the sweetness of solitude. Docs 

 this make you laugh, or does it touch you — or both ? I wish I 

 knew more about it, for I am sure there is much to say." But, 

 as the writer confesses, thereare many points with regard to the 

 artistic ideals of the Japanese where a foreigner cannot inform 

 himself, whether it be because the full import is lost in the mists 

 of antiquity, or because " they reserve it for better minds and 

 worthier apprehensions." The most significant fact made plain 

 in this delightful chapter of Mr. La Farge's is, we repeat, that ar- 

 chitecture is not an isolated art, but one intimately involved 

 with the love of nature and with the power of treating it in 

 artistic yet naturalistic ways. A temple is not what we would 

 understand by the name, but is a number of buildings of 

 various kinds "spread with infinite art over large spaces, open 

 or enclosed by trees and rocks. The buildings arc but parts 

 of a whole. They are enveloped by Nature, the principle and 

 the adornment of the subtile or mysterious meaning which 

 links them all together." 



