138 AMERICAN 
safer if one would have it constructed on cor- 
rect lines, to give the building of even the tini- 
est Japanese garden into the care of a native 
craftsman. 
The American-Japanese gardens, which pre- 
sent interesting studies in various sections of 
the country to-day, almost invariably include 
numerous flowers with their manifold orna- 
mental accessories—the Japanese azaleas, the 
dwarfed plum trees and many novel water 
plants being the prime favorites; but travelers 
in Japan frequently note the fact that the na- 
tive gardens are not necessarily flower gardens, 
neither are they always made for the purpose 
of cultivating plants. In nine cases out of ten 
there is nothing in the smaller plots to resemble 
a flower-bed. Some gardens may contain 
merely a sprig of green; some (although these 
are exceptional) have nothing green at all, 
and consist entirely of rocks, pebbles and sand. 
Neither does the Japanese garden require any 
fixed allowance of space; it may cover one or 
many acres; it may be only ten feet square; it 
may, in extreme cases, be much less, and be con- 
tained in a curiously shaped, shallow, carved 
box set on a veranda, in which are created 
tiny hills, microscopic ponds and _ rivulets 
spanned by tiny humped bridges, while queer, 
wee plants represent trees, and _ curiously 
formed pebbles stand for rocks. But on what- 
ever scale, all true Japanese gardening is land- 
scape gardening; that is, it is a living model 
of an actual Japanese landscape. 
It is an exceptional privilege to study at first- 
hand the significance of all the details that go 
to make up the true Japanese gardens, which 
have now become the fad in this country. I 
have been informed by an excellent authority 
on the subject that “through long accumulation 
of traditional methods, the representation of 
natural features in a garden model has come 
to be a highly conventional expression, like all 
Japanese art; and the Japanese garden bears 
somewhat the same relation to an actual land- 
scape that a painting of a view of Fuji-yama 
by the wonderful Hokusai does to the actual 
scene—it is a representation based upon actual 
and natural forms, but so modified to accord 
with accepted canons of Japanese art, so full of 
mysterious symbolism only to be understood by 
the initiated, so expressed, in a word, in terms 
of the national artistic conventions, that it costs 
the Western mind long study to learn to appre- 
ciate its full beauty and significance. 
‘Suppose, to take a specific example, that in 
the actual landscape upon which the Japanese 
gardener chose to model his design, a pine tree 
grew upon the side of a hill. Upon the side 
of a corresponding artificial hill in his garden 
he would, therefore, plant a pine, but he would 
not clip and trim its branches to imitate the 
shape of the original, but, rather, satisfied that 
by so placing it he had gone far enough toward 
the imitation of Nature, he would clip his gar- 
den pine to make it correspond as closely as 
circumstances might permit, with a conventional 
ideal pine tree shape, as though buffeted and 
gnarled by the fierce winds of centuries.” 
These native craftsmen will also assure the 
owners of the gardens they are constructing 
that there are ideal shapes not only for the 
HOMES AND GARDENS 
Wooden lantern and Japanese maples 
2 PETA 
A favorite type of stone bridge 
April, 1911 
A room, la) 
