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 1881, 
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 Hainan 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. 
