MODERN GARDENING 309 



European ideas, and have taken to the European classification 

 and nomenclature of plants. Already a new genus, named 

 Kirengeshoma, has been founded by a Japanese botanist. 

 Plants are sent from Japan in large quantities, and the cata- 

 logues of these " Far Eastern " nurserymen, attractively illus- 

 trated, now reach the keen amateur along with the list of bulbs 

 from Holland and roses from France. The English Japanese 

 garden is very unlike its prototype in Japan, where every stone 

 has a meaning, and each plant a significance, and all is done to 

 accord exactly with the rules which govern Horticultural art 

 in that country ; but it is also quite unlike any other type of 

 English garden, and altogether a new departure, and has 

 nothing in common with the " Chinese " gardening of the old 

 landscape school. 



Undoubtedly China has furnished the largest number of new 

 plants for the garden during recent years. The opening of 

 new treaty ports made an " open door," not only to trade and 

 enterprise, but to the botanist also. Since the days of Robert 

 Fortune a number of enthusiasts have dipped into the treasure 

 hordes of that vast empire, but immense fields were left un- 

 touched. The quantity of plants dried by Dr. Augustine 

 Henry 1 is almost incredible. He went to China as medical 

 officer in the service of the Chinese Maritime Customs in 188 1, 

 and his first batch of specimens reached Kew in 1886. So 

 astonishing was it that he was urged to continue, and he did 

 so for nearly twenty years. His different appointments took 

 him to various localities, some with tropical climates, others 

 at an altitude where frost and snow were frequent. Ichang, 

 1,000 miles up the Yangtze, yet only 70 feet above the sea- 

 level, was where the collection was begun, and it was carried on 

 in the Province of Szechuen, in the islands of Hainau and 

 Formosa, near Mengtze- Yunnan and Sczemao. The number 

 of dried specimens sent to Kew amounted to something like 

 158,000. Of these, there were some 5,000 distinct species, of 

 which at least 500 were new, and, what is most astonishing, 

 they included thirty new genera. Among those familiar were 

 new kinds of Clematis, Rhododendrons, Lonicera, Primula, Gen- 

 tiana, Lysimachia, Pedicularis, Rubus, Rosa, Vitis, and so on. 



1 Now reader in Forestry in the University of Cambridge. 



