H ouse and Garden 
are full of historical and poetic suggestions, 
even when made on a very tiny scale. 
l iny indeed they usually are, for princes 
are few and common folk many, and in ja¬ 
pan everybody must have a garden, though 
it be only a strip of a few feet wide between 
the fence and the side of a city house. Side 
it is, but not wall ; a side that is open all 
day toward this scrap of garden. This is 
the place for the six-inch pine trees, and the 
picturesque lanterns and toy bridges and odd 
stones; because however small, it must still 
be a picture, a real landscape with all its 
features in due proportion, or be in Japanese 
eyes no garden at all. 
Nothing is more striking to a stranger 
than the universal delight in growing things. 
The flower fairs held in the streets at night 
attract a throng of people, who come to 
admire and to buy ; and you see their pur¬ 
chases next day before their little open 
shops—the fishman’s and the cake shop, and 
the maker of wooden shoes, and all the rest. 
Here too are often placed the smallest land¬ 
scapes of all ; charmingly artistic creations, 
set within the limits of a shallow flower pot 
in which the smallest edition of pine or 
maple shades a mossy stone, and toy boats 
sail under toy bridges and past toy cottages 
on a winding river of sand. 
In all these gardens, large or small, flowers 
play a very subordinate part; they are ex¬ 
pected to do their growing in modest retire¬ 
ment, and appear only w'hen in bloom to 
take their part in the general scheme of 
things. Of course this does not apply to 
flowering trees and shrubs. On the other 
hand it is the custom to go “flower viewing,” 
to enjoy these at their proper season, and 
in one of the places specially famed for 
them,—as the cherry blossoms on Mount 
Yoshino, the maples of the Tatsuta River, 
the plum trees in Tsukigase Valley, all sung 
of poets, besides dozens of others less be¬ 
rhymed but perhaps not less beautiful. At 
some of these there is only one kind of flower 
grown, as in the famous iris fields of Horikiri, 
near Tokyo ; at others a succession—plum, 
wistaria, lotus, or peony and chrysanthemum, 
or the “Garden of a Hundred Flowers” at 
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