April, 1911 
sures on the form of unique fencing of reeds, bamboo and 
twigs present many pleasing forms and combinations. 
The famous Japanese landscape gardens that have been 
established on American country-seats have been sufficiently 
large to give a fairly good idea of Oriental landscape gar- 
dening on an extensive scale, and yet there is no reason why 
the owners of city homes with small backyards enclosed by 
ugly, high board-fences should not have them transformed 
by a bit of Japanese magic. Professor Morse tells, in his 
talks on the Japanese, of how they utilize the smallest areas 
of ground for garden effects. “I recall an example,” he 
says, ‘of a cheap inn, where I was forced to take a meal or 
go hungry until late at night. The immediate surroundings 
indicated poverty, the house itself being poorly furnished, 
the mats hard and uneven, and the attendants very cheaply 
dressed. Inthe room where our meal was served there was 
a circular window through which could be seen a curious 
stone lantern and a pine tree, the branches of which 
stretched across the opening, while beyond, a fine view of 
some high mountains was to be had. From where we sat on 
the mats there were all the evidences of a fine garden out- 
side; and wondering how so poor a house could sustain so 
fine a garden, I went to the window to investigate. What 
was my surprise to find that the extent of ground from which 
the lantern and pine tree sprung was Just three feet in width! 
Then came a low, board-fence, and beyond this stretched 
the rice-fields of a neighboring farmer. At home such a strip 
of land would, in all likelihood, have been the receptacle for 
broken glass and tin-cans and a thoroughfare for erratic 
cats; here, however, everything was clean and neat—and 
this narrow plot of ground, good for no other purpose, had 
been utilized solely for the benefit of the room within.” 
There is no reason why the smallest of these backyard 
gardens should lack any of thé indispensable accessories, for 
all may be reproduced on a miniature scale. In fact, a great 
AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 
I4I 
majority of city homes in Japan have very little more scope 
for their gardening than that contained in the brick-paved 
or cemented space back of the average city homes of 
America; and yet travelers in Japan, who have had access to 
private dwelling-places in the cities, as well as to the public 
inns, tell of wonderful ‘‘toy-gardens” in which nothing is 
lacking in Oriental completeness—there is a little artificial 
lake of pellucid brightness, a little artificial waterfall fit fer 
a naiad’s fountain, both fed by a little sandy-bottomed brook 
or conduit of clear, spring water; a cluster of little islands 
(one of them, perhaps, shaped like a tortoise) affording 
opportunities for impossible quaint little stone bridges, 
circle-backed, horseshoe-backed, or flat slabs of pretentious 
size, and every member of the cluster with its little stone 
pagoda, its quaint daimio-lantern, its toy shrine, or the fan- 
tastic bits of rock for which the Japanese pay such extrava- 
gant prices. 
On the artificial promontories will stand maples—plain 
maples, copper maples, pink maples, variegated maples—all 
within the fine splintery-leaf of the Japanese maples, trained 
into whimsical shapes, though not so whimsical as the fir 
trees (matsuji) which rival the box-hedge peacocks and 
other armorial bearings in old English baronial gardens. In 
the garden of the ‘Golden Pavilion” (Kinkakuji) at 
Kyoto, there is a fir tree tortured into the similitude of a 
junk in full sail; and every tiny garden will display some 
strikingly unique form of twisted and stunted pine tree. 
Where the stream runs into a little lake, there will be a bed 
of stately purple iris, and built out into it on piles, or span- 
ning a narrow arm as a covered bridge, a wistaria arbor, 
with long, purple blooms reaching down to the water in the 
springtime. The wild wistaria, which grows profusely in 
Japan, is one of the favorite garden flowers, and it is one 
that should figure prominently in the city gardens of this 
country, one that would give constant delight. 
Symbolical rocks are as important as lanterns in the Japanese garden 
