Japanese garden

“ 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. ”

“ The open rooms look upon a lovely garden, and paths of flat-topped stones lead through the tiny wilderness of lake, forest, thicket, and stream; over old stone bridges, stained and lichen-covered, to picturesque tea-houses and pavilions, overhanging the lake. Stone Buddhas and stone pagodas stand in shadowy places, and stone lanterns under dwarf pine-trees are reflected in the curve of every tiny bay. It is an ideal Japanese garden, with the dew of a midsummer morning on all the spider webs, and only the low note of the grasshoppers to break the stillness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No one knows better than the Japanese landscape artist what compound interest in beauty he reaps by the repetition and reflection of his earthy garden in his watery one. Just as mirrors enlarge little rooms, as the sea beneath a sunset intensifies the glory of the western sky, so water in a garden doubles the interest, the beauty, and the apparent size of the place in which it is put. But, more than all, it makes a point on which the idea of the composition rests, forms a road for the mind and the imagination to travel by, beyond the little enclosure into mystic realms. ”

“ As much can be said of most Japanese gardens outside Japan. If the soul is absent, how can dead lips deliver a message?
The nouveau riche in Japan does not, as in Western lands, at once set up motor cars, and huge houses with swarms of servants, but he enlarges his garden, or gets new ones; and such absolute connoisseurs are even this class (and from them straight down to the lowliest coolie does the same innate good taste appear) that he may produce, as I say, in a few months or years, as the case may be, a garden fit to compare with the best in the land. ”

“ The Japanese garden is essentially a landscape garden. The owner of a garden falls in love with a certain view. It haunts him, and awakens in him some primitive feelings of delight that cannot be analysed. He brings that view perpetually before him in his garden, in miniature, perhaps, but a miniature of wonderful exactness. His garden thus becomes a place of happy memory, and not a plot laid out with gaudy flowers and terraces that can have no meaning, no poetry to his mind. ”

“ 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 ”

“ How superior to the dusty, neglected back garden or court of a European house, too often only a piece of waste ground where the rubbish of the house accumulates, the space being condemned as too small for a garden. I can recall visions of many a tiny court no more than twenty feet square, within whose limits were compressed a liliputian pond, fed with clear water by the overflow of the water-basin; a dwarf pine, the soul of every Japanese garden, which in conjunction with a few small evergreen shrubs sheltered a moss-grown lantern. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Flowering trees take more part, and the plum, peach, cherry, magnolia, and camellia are all permitted; and the numerous fancy varieties of the maple, whose leaves enrich the autumn landscape with their scarlet glory, are as much prized as any of the blossoming shrubs. It is rather to the storm-bent old pine-trees and other evergreen trees and shrubs, to the mossy lichen-covered stones, to the clever manipulation of the water to represent a miniature mountain cascade or a flowing river, and to broad stretches of velvety moss that the true Japanese garden owes its beauty. ”

“ As a consequence, even the detractors of Japanese gardens have to confess that in no others is there a more assured sense of unity and of harmony of purpose.
The garden is planned from all points of view, and the scene from Nature from which it is a reduced but never literal transcript has been sketched and mapped and forgotten before it can be revived again. It may be that a small-sized copy of some famous scene has been chosen,—for the landscape artist loves to hitch his wagon to a star,—just as we might, if imitating some one else, pick on a great man, or a very noble and charming woman. ”

“ 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 ”

“ You would never find one part of a Japanese garden decorated with a Greek temple, approached by an Italian pergola, and surrounded by ‘old-fashioned’ flower-beds, as you might in home places. The whole garden would be subtly and delicately Japanese. Wherever any ideas are taken from China—as so many have been—they are incorporated into the garden politic by a process of ‘benevolent assimilation’; they are no longer foreign, but indefinably though perfectly Japanese—of the soil, because the work of man attempts only a transcription of natural scenery. ”

“ Without exact information, no stranger unfamiliar with the laws and the purpose of Japanese garden-construction could imagine that all this had a human designer some thousand years ago: the effect is that of a section of primeval forest, preserved untouched from the beginning, and walled away from the rest of the world in the heart of the old capital. The rock-faces, the great fantastic roots, the shadowed by-paths, the few ancient graven monoliths, are all cushioned with the moss of ages; and climbing things have developed stems a foot thick, that hang across spaces like monstrous serpents. ”

“ We may search the world for beauty, for tranquillity, for joy, and search in vain, unless we take it with us on our travels in the strong box of our own souls. In every garden in Japan those three things are planted, and we may enjoy them as freely as their owners, if we have the sun in our hearts to make the flowers bloom. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is the custom now in Japanese houses of the upper ten, to have one European furnished room, which is only used for the reception of foreigners. As we take tea out of the little eggshell cups, we do not think the garden looks large, but by the time we have followed the blue uniformed janitor, with the eternal chrysanthemum on his cap, in his up and down wanderings, we feel as if we had walked miles.
The Japanese ideal of landscape gardening is to have a different view from every point, and to this end they make a miniature park. ”

“ But, though modelled upon an actual landscape, the Japanese garden is far more than a mere naturalistic imitation. To the artist every natural view may be said to convey, in its varying aspects, some particular mental impression or mood, such as the impression of peacefulness, of wildness, of solitude, or of desolation; and the Japanese gardener intends not only to present in his model the features of the veritable landscape, but also to make it express, even more saliently than the original, a dominant sentimental mood, so that it may become not only a picture, but a poem. ”

“ To our Western ideas it seems impossible that a garden without flowers could be a thing of beauty, or give any pleasure to its owner. Yet, strange as it may appear, flowers for their own sakes do not enter into the scheme of Japanese gardening, and if any blossoms are to be found, it is probably, so to speak, by accident, because the particular shrub or plant which may happen to be in flower was the one best suited by its growth for the position it occupies in the garden. ”

“ A man may have a vigorous and healthy garden under way in the space of a few days,—trees forty or fifty feet high, and as many years old, sturdy shrubs and tender plants, all possessing a vitality and endurance under the intelligent management of a Japanese gardener, which permits them to be transported from one end of the city to the other. If for some reason the owner has to give up his place, every stone and ornamental fence, and every tree and plant having its commercial value, may all be dug up and sold and spirited away, in a single day, to some other part of the town. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Japanese gardens do not resemble ours in any respect; as a rule they contain no flower-beds, which in the majority of cases would disturb, if not destroy altogether, that impression of a landscape seen from afar, which is the fundamental idea of Japanese gardening, whether the garden in question be ever so extensive or ever so tiny. ”

“ They have the potential interest of the child, all youth’s wondering, iridescent possibilities, added to the deep heart, the sympathetic power of the woman, and the strength, the virility, the tonic force of the fine and large-souled man.
If you find no more in a Japanese garden than the look, or the lack, of a pretty face, you have never learned its magic, you have not got at the true spirit of its conception. ”

“ In these indispensable adjuncts to a Japanese garden, these people (than whom the Greeks and Etruscans never turned out more classically lovely although simple designs) have reached a very high level of art. I wonder why they never seem to be mentioned in the artistic rhapsodies of writers on things Japanese. It is a well-known fact that however common the object, however modest and lowly the use to which it is allotted, taste and care and love—for it comes to that—is put into the shape and the decoration of it. ”

“ Nearly every house in Japan possesses a garden, and the garden is a source of perpetual delight to every Japanese. He is enabled to give full vent therein to his love of flowers. Some critics have found fault with Japanese gardens on account of their monotony. Miniature lakes, grass plots, dwarfed trees, and trees clipped and trained into representations of objects animate and inanimate are the prevailing characteristics. ”

“ It is one of the constant wonders of this wonderful land that a new garden may, in so short a time, seem an old one.
If a rich man in Japan makes his house bigger, it goes without saying that he has to increase the size of his grounds, for, from least to largest, the one inflexible rule is to keep to scale in gardens and all surroundings. ”

“ It is a remarkable fact that the various trees and shrubs which adorn a Japanese garden may be successfully transplanted again and again without impairing their vitality. Trees of very large size may be seen, almost daily, being dragged through the streets on their way from one garden to another. ”

“ The Hakone Pass has many attractive places; in Tokio—even in Yokohama and Kobe—there are so many pretty ones; and every mountain or hill that boasts a view has its little shelter, and tiny half-wild garden, where one can get tea, and cool and a fine prospect all at the same time. The only rule of the landscape artist’s lore that these spots observe is that they must exhibit no artificiality, but resemble Nature as closely as possible. ”