The Iris Garden at Horikiri 
It would require too much space to at¬ 
tempt to give any adequate idea of the place 
the Iris holds in the art and literature of her 
country. Her praises have been sung in 
verse and painted on screen, kakemono , and 
even the single sheet print. In a recent ex¬ 
hibition by modern artists almost all their 
work was done on gauze or roe silk of a very 
transparent quality. This material proved 
excellently well qualified to suggest the trans¬ 
lucent greens of the spears and the sun- 
soaked quality of the flowers, whose marvel- 
The Iris flower! May it prove the 
mirror of wisdom to the mountain 
pheasant! 
The reference here is to the brilliant 
plumage of the mountain pheasant, the re¬ 
flection of which in water he mistakes for 
the colors of the Iris, thus not infrequently 
meeting his death by drowning. 
In a collection of verse which I have on 
the Iris, this is one of the simplest:— 
Kono tsuyu ga Hotaru ni naru ka 
Hana Shobu ! 
IN THE MIDST OF THE GARDEN AT HORIKIRI 
ously luminous and glowing petals are so 
diaphanous as to transmit the very quality ot 
light itself. As a rule, in these pictures, as 
in all Japanese painting, the fewer the brush 
strokes the more admirable the suggestion. 
Similarly in Japanese verse the image 
evoked is by means of a few syllables only. 
On the stone tablet in the garden at Hori¬ 
kiri, is transcribed the following : 
Yamadori no Chiye no Kagami-ka 
H ana Shobu ! 
Which may be rendered : 
These drops of dew upon the Iris, I 
wonder if at nightfall they become fire¬ 
flies. 
Like the picture of a few brush 
strokes, or the poem of a few syllables, 
the garden at Horikiri, in its large 
suggestiveness and its essential poetic feel¬ 
ing, remains with us in memory as the 
pictorial idea of a garden, and long after 
we have ceased to see it, is still a vision 
of that “ inward eye which is the bliss of 
solitude.” 
3 8 
