ART GARDENING IN JAPAN

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 12772, 1 June 1904, Page 4

ART GARDENING IN JAPAN

All Japanese gardens, as Aristotle says of all arls, are mimesis. They aim at a reproduction of some corner of Nature, some aspect of Nature. The Japanese is not a lover of flowers and of gardening in themselves, so much as for tire effect of a combination. He is of no use as a practical gardener, for growing normal plants in their normal health. He brutalises them, ignores their wishes, and harries them to death. On the other hand, he is unsurpassable when it comes to distorting, torturing, and tweaking into fantastic hyeways the plain courses of Nature. It is not the plant lie loves; it is the effect that tho plant enables him to attain, lie touches tiro highest point of artificiality; but ho must never be called a good gardener. Tire true gardener (says “.Macmillan’s Magazine”) cares far loss for the freakish or abnormal possibilities of a plant than for the plant itself, as an individual requiring the closest attention and brilliantly rewarding a loyal devotion. A true gardener is the humble slave of Nature; a Japanese is her contemptuous tyrant. Accordingly lire Japanese garden is a paradise of stones rattier than of blossom. If a (lower happens to come, well and good; but its bush was not put there to blossom so much as to set off the contrast between two lines of rock. For, when a garden is not ambitious enough or willing to mimic a landscape, it "becomes a rock-gai den, pure and simple, though very different from the careful cossett-ing-grouud for ill-tempered little Alpine plants that we mean by the name. A good Japanese garden of the ordinary sort is one where the rocks are of perfect size, shape, and disposition. They are relieved by round clipped bushes, which are liable to flower; but their prime test is the proportion of the whole, and the arrangement of the rooks in their prescribed order.