I 4 I 



JAPANESE GARDENS AND 

 FLOWER ARRANGEMENTS. 

 We have lately seen a good deal of the 

 Japanese plants for vases, pots, &c, the 

 best of whieh are said to be very old. 

 Occasionally the potted trees are beau- 

 tiful in form, especially when, as with 

 Cypress and Pines, the thing so treated 

 does not become a mere distortion. Gar- 

 dening, like almost every other human 

 pursuit, is subject to variations of fashion 

 not always to its profit, and we cannot 

 say that this recent movement in Japa- 

 nese ways is likely to be a gain. On the 

 contrary, it sets us thinking in wrong 

 ways, and wrong thinking often leads to 

 wrong acting. One or two examples 

 of Japanese gardens lately made in Lon- 

 don, such as those at Holland House, 

 are anything but likely to stimulate 

 our devotion to the Japanese ideas of 

 a garden. Few of us can say how far 

 these show the real thing, and we doubt 

 if they do show it at all fairly ; plants 

 in pots we see too often, and we late- 

 ly passed through a large collection of 

 them, not six out of a score being 

 worth looking at. Many of them were 

 mere nursery wastrels such as would be 

 thrown away in our own nurseries ; a 

 good nurseryman would not have let 

 them go out of his place, knowing that 

 they could do him no good. Even the 

 best of these pot-plants would seem like 

 the work of a little town-imprisoned 

 people with no ground to grow things 

 in their natural form. 



But when we come to the Japanese 

 way of arranging flowers it is a differ- 

 ent matter altogether. There they un- 

 doubtedly have beautiful ideas and the 



art of arranging their favourite plants 

 and flowers to get their full effect. They 

 talk of these as " styles " and make a pro- 

 fession of teaching them, but there is 

 really not much (at least to a Western 

 mind) in their fine-drawn distinctions. 

 The real lesson to be learned is that we 

 should go to Nature herself. You can- 

 not beat the toss of the double Cherry- 

 branch hanging in the free air, and the 

 Japanese get as near to that as they can. 

 We cannot surpass in grace or beauty 

 the port of the Iris-flower and its leaves. 

 But take the best flowers and jam them 

 together in the form of our approved 

 "nosegays" and we get another and a 

 very bad result. 



There is a good deal of very curious 

 and subtle writing about these Japan- 

 ese effects in a list published by one 

 of their flower-artists, parts of which 

 read as follows: — "Several styles are 

 practised — as the Koriu, the Enshiu, 

 the Misho, and the Ikenobo — and in 

 each of these are various schools, each 

 with its own interpretation of the uni- 

 versal rules, and each with its own mani- 

 pulation. And among all of them curious 

 traditional meanings are attached to the 

 parts that go to make a flower-compo- 

 sition. Thus, in the formula of Ten- 

 chi-jin, the three main stems stand for 

 the heavens, earth, and mankind. A tall, 

 almost upright leaf or stem will repre- 

 sent Ten, the sky; a lower leaf carried in 

 a sweep almost horizontally is Chi, the 

 earth ; while a third, on the opposite 

 side and higher than Chi, though lower 

 than Ten,is Jin, the people of the world." 

 But none of these formulae are allowed 

 to disturb in any way the attainment of 



