THE ASSOCIATIONS OF FLOWERS 259 



have a peculiar Japanese character; and how by 

 reason of that character they have a foreign look in 

 our gardens. The explanation of this must be, not 

 that they come from a very distant country, but that 

 they are associated with an art utterly different from 

 our own, so different that, however much we may 

 admire and imitate it, it still remains strange and 

 imreal to us. And thus Japanese flowers, beautiful 

 as they are and in many cases easily grown in our 

 gardens, are apt to look strange and unreal to us. 

 They seem not works of nature, but the products of 

 a fantastic Oriental mind. The Japanese have made 

 decoration of their flowers with so little elimination 

 or perversion of fact that the flowers themselves seem 

 to us to be decoration, of an utterly alien kind, even 

 when they are growing in our gardens or half wild 

 in our woods. The hardy azaleas are grown every- 

 where now, but there is still something in their beauty 

 that is incongruous with our English gardens; and 

 there is the same incongruity in nearly all Japanese 

 shrubs which flower before their leaves are fully out, 

 particularly in the early flowering magnolias. It is 

 a curious fact that even Japanese flowers which are 

 not familiar to us in Japanese art, such as the Platy- 

 codon, have a Japanese look; and that the Fxmkias 

 or Plantain Lilies which have been so long in our gar- 

 dens still seem to belong to a different world from 

 that of the Larkspurs and Phloxes and other border 

 plants commonly associated with them. These plants 

 have certain qualities of texture and form upon which 



