12 



JOURNAL OE THE EOYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



JAPANESE PLANTS AND GARDENS. 



By R. Farker, F.R.H.S. 



[Lecture given on May 9, 1905.] 



The English lover of flowers is confronted at the outset with a grave 

 difficulty when he comes to consider the question of Japanese horticulture. 

 For the Japanese look upon flowers and gardens from an entirely opposite 

 standpoint to our own. To a Japanese the plants exist for the garden, 

 not the garden for the plants. A Japanese garden is designed solely as an 

 imitation of landscape — it is a matter of rockwork, perspective, and care- 

 ful artifice. In fact, Japanese gardening is rather an architectural than a 

 cultural art. Many, abstruse, occult, and minute are the ritual rules, the 

 artistic canons, the inner symbolism that rigidly govern the correct placing 

 of every rock and stone in a well-built Japanese garden. But among 

 these rules, those dealing with the beauty and comfort of plants are rarely 

 if ever consulted. The gardener is of little use as a grower of normal 

 plants in their normal conditions, as such are not required for his 

 purpose. On the other hand, he is unsurpassable when it comes to 

 torturing and maiming some little bush into the prescribed canonical 

 shape for the position that it is to occupy in the rockwork's perspective. 

 This, of course, is not to say that a fine Japanese garden is not supremely 

 beautiful and satisfying to the artistic sense ; only its beauty is of a 

 totally different nature, springing from totally different aims, and based 

 on totally different methods from those that dictate the loveliness of an 

 English flower-border : and the two beauties are so utterly unlike that no 

 9 comparison can possibly be made between them. 



Though the views of the Japanese gardeners as regards the selection 

 and proper manner of growth of plants are most artificial, the Japanese 

 have, as is well known, their favourite flowers, such as Wistaria multi- 

 juga and Iris Kcempferi — for whose successful treatment they recommend 

 as sunny a position as possible combined with plenty of moisture, and 

 liquid manure in the spring rather than a constant soaking with water. 



English sentiment is too apt to -assume that the Japanese love all 

 flowers equally. This is far from being the case. They have, as I have 

 shown, little artistic reverence for most flowers, and their real admiration 

 is restrained to those plants that most invariably obey the canonical rules 

 of curve ard colour. The iris, cherry, peach, bamboo, magnolia, wistaria, 

 azalea, camellia, Ictus, plum, and pine are among the elect. But the rcse 

 and the lily, being unrefined flowers according to Japanese artistic laws, 

 are more or less beyond the pale of horticultural tolerance. The favoured 

 plants, even, are rarely allowed to appear in the garden proper : they are 

 grown in beds at some distance from the elaborate landscape, so as not to 

 interfere with its proportions. And yet, though the canons of art are thus 

 stern, popular Japanese sentiment is busy with wild flowers. Even the 

 rarer species have each their common name, and whereas it would be 



