Harriet Osgood Taylor

“ But, while I have not one word of praise for the mid-Victorian hideousness of their new official grounds and buildings, I feel serenely confident that such an artistic people must in time return to their own old ideals of the gardener’s art. The feeling for the poetry of Nature, the sympathetic response to the appeal of natural beauty, is so great in the whole people, from Emperor to rickshaw coolie, that no amount of national pride—which thinks it ranks itself with the great nations of the West in assuming their bad taste—can for long be so misguided. ”

“ Like the darkie saying about Hyacinth bells, the Japanese believe that for each year there is a new flower on the old stalk.
August is the month of Lotus flowers, as Japan is the land of them. At dawn, on dreaming moat and lake, their réveillé salute of opening buds is sounded. Hardly longer than the much loved Convolvulus blooms do they last, for a day sees the height of their perfection of shape and line, and then the petals fall, to show, like the other favourite, a seed-pod of a design as richly decorative, as gracefully shaped, as the flower. ”

“ Put simply, landscape gardening in Japan is a reproduction, more or less reduced in scale, of the scenery of the surrounding country. This is its material foundation; but, just as every scene from Nature, of whatever composition of rock and river and hedgerow, has its effect on the feelings and the imagination, so the Japanese garden has, beneath the beautiful body that meets the eye, the æsthetic sentiment that is perceived only by the mind, the heart, the soul. ”

“ It seems as if the Japanese love flowers more for themselves than for the images they evoke, and yet what is love but a divine imagination! A man who loves his mistress for her beauty or for her character alone, who endows her not with transcendental qualities, has a narrow margin of affection on which to draw; that which is all explained is at the end of its interest. How, then, is it that the Japanese—of all the people on this earth the fondest, as a nation, of flowers—without the fairy wand of impersonation to assist are such true and faithful lovers of them! ”

“ While it is a fact that the basis of Japanese gardening is greenness, its fundamental purpose being a place for peace and repose and for quiet contemplation of Nature, which that harmonious, living colour assists more than any other in securing, yet it does not follow that it is nothing else but this. While vegetation is the last thing to be considered in making a garden,—it being the flesh that covers the bones, or the stones, of its skeleton,—the green might be regarded as the natural complexion, and the basis on which the flowers of dress appear to adorn. ”

“ It is the survival of the Japanese garden, and all that the love of it still implies, which has saved Japan from being brutalized by improvement, from being crushed beneath the responsibility of transformation into a great Power, that has redeemed her from the curse that money-making brings. In the overturning of old ideals, while love of beauty and living things remains, Japan, thank God, can never grow into one of the sordid countries that the West knows so well. ”

“ Poetry is deeply inwoven with this graceful art. Indeed, that is always the most alluring part of the study of anything in Japan—every subject opens up others, even though, as in this case, the one art is long enough for a life’s work. And as sincerity is the touchstone of any real art, so it is of this—sincerity of feeling, of faithful labour, of loving study. “We cannot touch another’s heart with anything less than our own,” and, however humble the means of presentation of an art may be, informed and performed with truth and love it is art. ”

“ As the Double Rule of Three will never, I fear, be anything but a mystery to me, I can only hope that the bearing of the verse upon Gates may not be too strictly insisted upon. Many parts of a Japanese garden are mysterious and hard to understand; some comprehension of the sentiments which underlie them one can only come at by glimpses of insight into the national character, by moments of clairvoyance that illuminate the subject like flashes of lightning. The key is not in the lock, but in the mind of the garden viewer, in the heart of the garden lover. ”

“ The Japanese in no way resemble the ancient Romans in wanting a skeleton at the feast, or a skull crowned with roses and filled with wine. They never, as most Western nations do, even make their cemeteries into parks, where young lovers may wander, and mingle present hopes with past sorrows, sentiment with grief. Gardens are for contemplation, recreation, communion with Nature and one’s own soul, and into them death, except as it comes in the falling petal, the withered leaf, the flaming embers of the dying fires of the Maple, is not permitted to intrude. ”

“ The rocks and stones of a garden in Japan are its bones and ribs. Its muscles, nervous system, veins and arteries, and beautiful outer covering of flesh, are its trees and shrubs, its watercourses, pools and wells, its flowering plants. I cannot quote Walt Whitman and say, as he did to the child who asked, “What is the grass?”—“And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves,” because a lawn is, more often than not, absent from a Japanese garden, and hard-beaten, purply red earth, or finely raked sand, or beautifully patterned gravel, takes its place. ”

“ If there is a pother over the preparation for the closing of the schools in America and England, there is fuss enough over the preparation for the New Year in Japan. Such a pounding, all in time, as there is of rice for cakes—for the Oriental does his whipping of eggs for his omelette, his mashing of vegetables, and his beating of batter for pudding in a rhythmic cadence, as regular as that of castanettes or negro ‘bones’—a kind of ‘devil’s tattoo.’ It is almost as stimulating to the mind as the fragrant scents from the kitchen are to the nostrils at a later stage of the proceedings. ”

“ This is, after all, but a bald statement of the festivals of Japan, because the day hardly passes in which is not celebrated somewhere or in some way the gracious gifts of Nature, or in which the invisible and benign gods, who exist for the Japanese in every manifestation of life, are not invoked by rites of sacrifice, or worshipped in some outward act of rejoicing. These people have been taught since the earliest recorded era to hold constant communion with the unseen forces of Nature. Ideas which are strange and novel to us are commonplaces—if such things can ever be that—to them. ”

“ Early March sees the Plum blossom ended, and the Peach blossom arrive—the flower dedicated to girls. The hills that have had the real snow on the ground, and the flower-snow in the air and on the trees, have lost the white to gain the green. The world is broad awake now, and birds are twittering. Daphnes, pink and white, have come, and pink Forsythias, and the fluffy golden balls of Edgeworthia papirifera, from which Japanese tough-fibred paper is made, and a multitude of little plants the spring brings to other lands. ”

“ The chastity, almost austere harmony, of a Japanese room, with its honey-coloured mats, its pale diffused lighting from paper-covered windows (like bright moonlight, or as if snow lay outside) , is seldom broken by any flowers more gaily hued than silk-petalled Irises, Plum or rosy Cherry blossoms, or the sombre branches of Pine. Sometimes the only decoration in the whole room—for there never is any furniture, as all the world knows, and everything decorative is placed in the sacred niche—is an old block of half-decayed wood, covered with delicately beautiful, silvery fungi. ”

“ The Plum blossom (Ume no hana) is masculine, but it typifies spiritual strength and beauty. If we translate this into courage, it sounds like a more manly characteristic. Of all the flowers of this flowery land it is the one most often referred to in poetry, one might well say the best loved. With its delicate petals, white as snowflakes, rosy as a child’s cheeks, deep red as a woman’s mouth, it seemed the last flower to place as the foremost of the ‘Four Floral Gentlemen,’ to liken to the sturdy qualities of a man, but as I looked longer I saw the subtle comparison. ”

“ Spring, in other lands than Japan, gives us misty purples and pale mauves in her flowers, and if to this poetic people the fragile beauty of the Iris, the delicate, drooping grace of the Wistaria, appeal more than the flaming glory of their Azaleas, it is only, perhaps, because the wistfulness of the charm of these flowers suits their character and climate, and is more in sympathy with their ideas. Certainly, in the autumn, their worship of colour equals that of any nation, if it does not surpass it ”

“ The artist who creates as a hen lays an egg attracts us no more to his work than the hen by her frenzied cackling does to hers. And as without love all is naught, so, without the ardours and anguishes of the soul, is all useless. The spring that is not wrenched painfully from the lap of winter, the spring that follows languidly and tamely after the heat and greenness of a tropic season, has lost much that makes it dear. What we gain in ease of attainment is forfeited in delight—the high, sharp edge that is suffering and joy in one. ”

“ One loves the quaint old churchyards of England, with their tangled grasses, their occasional flowers, their silence, and their peace, but the temple gardens of Japan are as far removed from such places as graves are. How carefully tended they are—it is their only fault! No leaves are allowed to lie, no sticks or stones to encumber any spot the landscape artist has not marked for them. All is as of Nature, but of an enriched and elegant sort, exquisitely spontaneous. ”

“ I cannot but prefer—even in this materialistic age when we are only just beginning to turn towards the influences of spiritual notions on hard, everyday things—a rock which rejoices in the name of the ‘Guardian Stone,’ and has its place and functions all prescribed for it, to an ordinary stone without a name or associations of any sort. To know something of geology, of botany, of any natural science, helps to interest the most casual walker or stroller in a garden: the artist is never bored by the quietest country life where he can find a picture (and he is not an artist if he cannot) ”

“ The foundation of the art of tea-garden making is that of all the others—Nature! But where temple grounds can be serene, grand, imposing, or elegant, tea-gardens must be modelled on Nature’s homelier moods—where with wildness there is also found comfort, with rusticity quiet and tender charm. Flowers there should be, and running water, and the life and gaiety of darting carp or goldfish, or of domesticated birds, and these one always finds. ”

“ There are brightly draped little booths, erected near all the finest view-places, where tea and saké and little cakes, stamped or iced in the image of the festal bloom, can be had; and there are sprays of the blooms for sale—real ones that seem artificial, they are so perfect, and artificial ones that seem real, for the same reason; and toys, and little lanterns, all reminiscent of the Cherry flower. And still are verses in praise of the blossoms hung on the boughs in the old-time way, written by anyone—the man in the street, perhaps. ”

“ I firmly believe that if Japan had continued to copy even and only the gardens of China, and had gone her course in other ways, she would not be to-day one of the great nations of this earth. For I assert unfalteringly that, her gardens being an expression of the national spirit, the beautiful outward and visible sign of the country’s inward and spiritual grace, if they had not existed in their present state of evolution Japan would have become, like China, corrupt, artificial, mercenary, of few extraordinary private virtues, and of no civic and public ones. ”

“ Japan is not a hot country, except on the coast during the months of July and August, but, nevertheless, the idea everywhere prevails that a garden must look, even if it is not, cool. Running water, then, or rather moving water, suggests coolness, but not coldness. In the depths of winter, when the rest of the world is hushed in white, deathlike sleep, the water pulses still with life. If a little lake is the garden’s heart it must be one whose source can be seen, whether a stream, a cascade, or a spring ”

“ While the gardens of the Japanese have much of material charm, of rich and plentiful vegetation, of rare and splendid as well as exquisite though less striking flowers, of gracious bodily attraction (if I may so name it) , it is to the inner sense, to the mind and the heart, that they make their chiefest appeal. In its most real meaning a garden, to them, must be a place of repose, of contemplation, of spiritual communion with Nature. There can a man loaf, and invite his soul ”

“ I never got used to those wonderful Lilies of Japan. My heart simply stopped beating the first time I saw, on a wild, rough hill-side above the sea, the splendid, stately blooms, standing up like royalty over the humbler flowers in the grass. No, surely Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these! And that these kings of the plant world should appear thus in all their rich state garments, crowned and sceptred, without a Court to set off their glory! ... I saw whole fields of our Easter or Madonna Lilies (L. longiflorum) , pure and white, bathed in the sunshine of an August day ”

“ Nor lights nor garlands make the holiday,
The happy mind in working is at play;
Spring’s herald-bird brings summer on its wing;
The heart’s the happy day’s best madrigal.”
No country on earth has more poetic reasons for its holidays and fêtes than has Japan. If they are not deliberate rejoicings over the perfection of some flower—as in the case of the festivals of the Cherry, the Chrysanthemum, the Maple—they are so adorned by, and inextricably mixed with, the blooms of the day they celebrate that we can hardly distinguish between the offerings on the altar and the decorations there. ”

“ A Japanese garden bridge is, to my unmathematical mind, the most delightful sort possible (although the delight is full of the spice of variety) , because it is seldom the shortest route between the two sides of a stream, and it never even pretends that it has been erected to save time. A garden, more especially a garden in Japan, is a place to loiter in; the bridges, the little islands of the lake, the summer-houses on the shore, the seats in the shade, the very stepping-stones, which do not help one’s feet to hasten, are all means to that end. You do not come into the garden to make money ”

“ We saw the cloisonné, from its designing in Chinese ink on rice paper, to the final stone-polishing stage which may take a year to do, and everywhere was that tranquil spirit of the garden, no haste and no slackness, steady and ever moving. Happy in their daily toil, these artists create their beautiful works with love, and the result is something of deeper value and more permanence of beauty than a thousand machine-made things of the same sort could have. ”

“ On every takenomo, Momo branches are put in the ceremonial vase, and the great family of dolls, which makes its collected appearance on that day alone of the year, are set out in the special alcove on five shelves covered with strips of rich scarlet brocade. Such joy of colour there is—the flaming blossoms of the Peach, the gorgeous Venetian-rivalling brocade, the indescribable beauty and richness of the costumes of the dolls! They are not the everyday kind, with broken noses and entrails of hair, or streaming gore of sawdust protruding from a torn side that we loved so in our youth ”

“ I hope it is to be one of the last, for of all the many lovely things in Japan—high courage and patriotism, kindness and courtesy to the old and to the stranger, eternal cheerfulness and eternal industry, gentleness to children and to birds and to all timid wild things—I think that one of the loveliest is their love of beauty, their insistence on it as one of the primary needs of life, and their belief in it as a moral and spiritual uplifter. ”

“ From rustic shelters, up through the simple bamboo arbours, and rough, shed-like structures, we make our way to elaborate and beautiful little houses of one or two matted rooms designed for the ceremonial tea-drinking. In these a very delicate perfection of detail may be found, as in the most exquisite of dwelling-houses, although only intended for occasional use, as a real summer-house would be. For everything that is useful must have beauty, in Japan, and everything that has beauty must be used—that is, enjoyed, appreciated. The garden must be fair and pleasant, to give contentment ”

“ Of wild gardens, where all Japan’s a garden, and all the men and women merely flowers, it is even a more hopeless task to begin to chronicle. But, thinking back over the years, the place of the kind which stands out most clearly in my memory is the hara between Chuzenji and Yumoto. The Great Gardener had planted as He willed, and the wide plain was one vast field of flowers. ”

“ The only difference would be that we should probably hit on some angularity of character, some extravagance that seemed to make for individuality,—for how often are bad manners copied because they are the unhappy endowment of a famous politician, or of a duchess, or a well-known beauty!—instead of eliminating the ugly details, as the Japanese does in his landscape picture, using only those salient features that will at once adorn the place and yet carry on the real spirit of the model. ”

“ The people who venerate age love the Plum for its beauty of crooked bough and ancient trunk, as much as for the frail promise of spring in its bloom; and I, who am half a Japanese in this, can sympathize with those who nip off the buds, so that the exquisite lines of stem and branch may not be lost with overweight of fragrant flowers.
It is a tragedy when the petals begin to fall. ”

“ Venice, in her opulent days, gave no greater sums for gold-decked gondolas; and Holland, in spite of her thrift and her riches, was not so extravagant in the sums spent on Tulips as were the Japanese noblemen with their specimen Chrysanthemums, their Morning Glories, their Irises, and their garden stones. To this day no foreigner will pay what they will spend for such things, because the one exquisite touch means less to us. ”

“ A poetic Japanese friend laid great stress on other open spaces of water expressing the garden’s mood, as they reflect the colour and changes of the sky; the well, dark and shadowed, sombre though pure, remains the constant and unfailing spring of life, the soul of the garden. When that fails the flowers wither and fade, the leaves and mosses dry and shrivel, the trees, even, droop and die. The garden’s spirit is gone! ”

“ Like the exquisite simplicity of a Japanese room, each stone has a certain use, a certain meaning, a certain sentiment attached to it. It usually fills a double purpose, and is of use as well as a thing of beauty; for although, if any people ever did believe that beauty is its own excuse for being, these do, they make their beautiful things useful, and their useful things are invariably beautiful. ”

“ The goldfish will do the darting about, and we can get our feeling of life and movement in watching them. Or we may follow the flight of the bird we have startled from the Cherry tree, and study the struttings and preenings of the two sparrows that so boldly hop and peck beside the water-basin, or lazily observe the great velvet-blue butterfly, cho-cho-no-hana, or ‘insect like a flower,’ that flits from bloom to bloom among the Irises, softly, as if they were petals blown by the breeze. ”

“ Tyndale says—to hope to show on his canvas one-half of the flowers which Nature so prodigally lavishes on the year.
Cherry blossoms are scarce fading before Azaleas are ready to carry on the rich harmonies of colour; and as a passionate love motif begins to weave itself into the end of a symphony’s movement before we get it presented in all its full splendour of great crashing notes and full-gathered chords in its final evolution, so the Azaleas begin suavely in shadowy mauve blooms before the gorgeous climax of their scarlet, orange, crimson, and snow-white blossoms bursts forth. ”