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The Flowers and Gardens of Japan
(1908):
A landscape garden may be of any size,
from the miniature scenes, representing pigmy groves, and mossy precipices,
with lilliputian torrents of white sand, compressed into the area of a
china dish, to the vast gardens with their broad sheets of water and majestic
trees which surround the Daimyo castles of old or the Imperial palaces
of to-day; but the sense of true proportion must be rigidly adhered to.
Large rocks and boulders are out of place in a small garden, and small
stones in a large garden would be equally unsuitable. The teachers
of the craft have been most careful to preserve the purity of style.
Over-decoration is condemned as vulgar ostentation, and faulty designs
have been regarded as unlucky, in order to avoid degeneration in the art.
Arranged in rows on wooden platforms
will be the object of our visit to the nursery garden -- the dwarf trees
-- whose fame has spread throughout the world, and who seem to share with
the cherry blossom the floral fame of Japan. When first I visited
the country I went prepared to be disappointed with the dwarf trees; I
had seen inferior specimens shipped to Europe no doubt because of their
inferiority, pining away a lingering life in a climate unsuited to them,
deprived of all care and attention; for an idea prevailed in England when
they were first imported, that these tiny trees, the result of years of
patient training, required no water, and either no fresh air or else were
equally indifferent to the fiery rays of the summer suns or the icy blasts
of the winter winds. A visit to a garden in their native country
will soon reveal that such is not the case. The trees are not coddled,
it is true, but the proper allowance of water, especially in their growing
season, is most important, and they are impatient of a draught; though
many seem to stand the full rays of the sun, the best specimens had generally
some light canvas or bamboo blinds, arranged so that they could be drawn
over the stands during the hottest hours of the scorching summer days.
I have heard these trees described as tortured trees; to me, good specimens
never gave that impression, their charm took possession of me, and a grand
old pine or juniper whose gnarled and twisted trunk suggested a giant of
the forest, and yet was under three feet in height, standing in a soft-coloured
porcelain bowl, gave me infinite pleasure. I could see no fault in
them, they are completely satisfying and give a strange sense of repose.
Their variety is infinite, from six
inches in height to as many feet
[sic]
; pines, junipers, thujas, maples,
larch, willows, and among the flowering trees, pink and white plum, single
and double cherries, tiny peach-trees, smothered by their blossoms, pyrus
trained in fantastic shapes, all will be there in bewildering choice of
beauty. I have heard of a single treasure, a weeping willow, only
six inches in height, the reward of years of patience, for which the price
of 7000 yen (£700) was paid; probably to our eyes it would have no
more value than a humble "dwarf" which, in consequence of some slight imperfection,
would not fetch more than sevenpence. In a perfect specimen not only
each branch, but each twig and each leaf, most conform absolutely in direction
and proportion to the same unbending laws which govern this art, as well
as its sister arts of landscape gardening and flower arrangement -- laws
which a writer says were 'the iron rules laid down by the canons of taste
in the days when Iyeyasu Tokugawa paralysed into an adamantine immobility
the whole artistic and intellectual life of the country.' So in every
garden there will be failures as perfect works of art, but beautiful in
our eyes, which fail to see any difference between the perfect specimen
with its boughs bent down by the weight of the laws which have trained
it and priced it at some hundred yen, or the 'failure' by its side, beautiful
and wonderful, with all its imperfections an exquisite and dainty thing,
priced at as many pence.
Perhaps one of the best opportunities
for buying these imperfect trees, which are still admired and readily bought
by the Japanese themselves, though not to be treasured as works of art,
is at the sales which take place at night in the streets of Kyoto on certain
days of the month. The plants are arranged on stalls down each side
of a narrow street, and the intending purchaser has to fight his way through
a dense crowd to choose his plants. No lover of dwarf trees should
miss attending one of these sales, and perhaps the uncertainty as to whether
the plant is in good health, or the bowl containing it is broken, adds
to the excitement of bargaining with the stallholder; every Japanese loves
a bargain, and the transaction is eagerly watched by the crowd, and the
'foreign devil' will gain their admiration if he can hold his own against
the rapacity of the salesman. As the plants vary in price, from a
few sen to two or three yen, one can afford to carry off a sufficient number
to ensure having some, at least, that will be a reward for one's patience.
On the 1st of April the best night-market of the year is held. The
stalls will be covered with tempting little flowering trees, their
buds almost bursting and full of promise of lovely blossoms to come --
sturdy little peach-trees, their branches thickly covered with soft velvet
buds just tinged with pink; drooping cherries wreathed with red-brown buds;
slender pyrus trained into wonderful twisted shapes; little groves of maple-trees,
their scarlet or bronze leaves just unfurling, or miniature forests of
larch, shading mossy ravines with rivers of white sand; ancient pine-trees
spreading their branches over rocky precipices rising from a bed of pebbles;
sweet-scented daphnes, golden-flowering forsythias, and early azaleas in
porcelain dishes, which are round or oval, square, shallow or deep, and
of every shade, from white, through soft greys and blues into a deep green.
Every plant is a picture in itself, and the difficulty lies in deciding,
not which to buy, but which one can bring oneself to leave behind.
Siebold, who visited Japan and wrote
the
Flora Japonica
upwards of sixty years ago, thus describes the dwarf trees:--
'The Japanese have an incredible fondness
for dwarf trees, and with reference to this cultivation of the Ume, or
Plum, is one of the most general and lucrative
[sic]
employments of the country. Such plants are increased by in-arching,
and by this means specimens are obtained which have the peculiar habit
of the Weeping Willow. A nurseryman offered me for sale in 1826 a
plant in flower which was scarcely three inches high; this
chef d'oeuvre
of gardening was grown in a little lacquered box of three tiers, similar to
those filled with drugs which the Japanese carry in their belts; in the
upper tier was this Ume, in the second row a little Spruce Fir, and at
the lowest a Bamboo scarcely an inch and a half high.'"
The Japanese still love their dwarf
trees as much as they did in the days of Siebold, and the trade in them
has received additional impetus of late years, as great numbers
[sic]
are exported annually to Europe and the United States, where I fear they
are not treasured as works of art, but are only regarded as curiosities.
At different seasons of the year the
nursery gardens will be gay with the display of some especial flower.
Early in May the gaudy-coloured curtains and paper lanterns at the gates
will announce, in the bold black lettering which is one of the chief ornaments
of the country, that a special exhibition of azaleas is being held.
It is scarcely conceivable that any plants bear so many blossoms as do
these stiff and prim little azalea-trees; the individual blooms are small,
but their serried ranks form one dense even mass, flat as a table, for
no straggling branches are allowed in these perfectly grown plants.
Every shade is there, an incredible blaze of colour, all the plants the
same shape, all practically the same size, and all in the same shaped pots,
the only variety being in the delicate hue of the faience pots or the vivid
colouring of the blossoms. The pots are arranged in rows or stages
under the blue and white checked roofing, which seems peculiarly to belong
to flower exhibitions; the effect cannot be said to be artistic, but there
is something very attractive about the little trees, which are visited
by the same crowd of sight-seers, who seem to spend their days in 'flower-viewing'
and quiet feasting on the matted benches, the latter being inseparable
from these flower resorts.
Other flower exhibitions will follow
in their turn -- great flaunting paeonies, brought with loving care from
the gardens near Osaka; and then the last and most treasured flower of
all, the chrysanthemum...
At the end of the year may also be seen
the dishes being prepared with a combination of plum, bamboo, and pine
which will be found on the
tokonoma
of almost every house throughout
the empire at the New Year, bringing good luck and long life to the inmates.
Sometimes the combination will be merely a flower arrangement, but usually
it is of a more lasting nature, and a little plum-tree covered with soft
pink buds, a tiny gnarled old pine, and a small plant of bamboo, will be
firmly planted in the dish, a rock and a few stones may be added for effect,
and the ground mossed over to suggest great age. Occasionally a clump
of some everlasting flower, such as
Adonis amurensis, is used instead of the plum.
It is probably in the nursery garden
that the traveller will first see one of the toy gardens called
Hachi-niwa
-- dish gardens -- where a perfect landscape and a well-known scene is
accurately represented within the limited area of a shallow china dish,
varying size from six inches in length to two feet. Here we have
another art, for the making of
Hachi-niwa
is almost as much trammelled
by rules and conventions as its fellow-arts of flower arrangement and landscape
gardening, and the same unbending law of proportion is the first consideration.
Just as the landscape gardener chooses the scene which his garden is to
represent, in proportion to the size of the ground which the future garden
is intended to cover, so the maker of a
Hachi-niwa
must choose his
scene in proportion to the size of his dish; or, as his choice of dishes
may be infinite, varying from a few inches upwards, and being in shape
round or oval, long and narrow, with square or rounded ends; so having
decided on his landscape, he may then choose his dish. As I had been
much attracted by these little miniature gardens, each in itself a perfect
picture, I determined to learn something of the manner of their construction
and to try and grasp a few of the principles of the art. I had heard
of a gardener in Kyoto who was a great master in the art, a disciple and
pupil of one of the Tokyo professors, who might tell me what I wished to
learn. On my first visit to his house he looked incredulous at the
idea of a foreigner wishing to study the art of
Hachi-niwa.
Thinking I could only wish to purchase a ready-made garden to carry off
as a curiosity, he appeared decidedly reserved, and reluctant to impart
any information on the subject of their composition. A friend who
accompanied me, and was more eloquent in his language than I was, assured
him that I was in earnest -- not merely a passer-by, but one who had already
spent many months in his country; then his interest awoke, and he asked
me to return the next day, when he would have all the materials prepared
and I could choose my subject.
Many a happy hour did I spend making
these little gardens and learning something of their history. A certain
paraphernalia is necessary for the construction of these miniature landscapes,
and the requisite materials include a supply of moss of every variety --
close cushions of moss to form the mountains, flat spreading moss to clothe
the rocks, white lichened moss to carpet the ground beneath the venerable
pine-trees, which in themselves are especially grown and dwarfed, till
at the age of four or five years they will only have attained the imposing
height of as many inches; leaning and bent pines for the scenery of Matsushima
[a small bay northeast of Sendai filled with hundreds of small pine-clad
islands]
or the garden of Kinkakuji
[the Golden Pavilion]
, groves of tiny maples for Arashiyama
[an extremely beautiful spot believed to contain within its limited area all
the beauties of nature, including large pines interspersed with innumerable
maples and cherry trees]
, and pigmy trees of all descriptions.
Finally, there are microscopic toys to give life to the scene -- perfect
little temples and shrines, in exact imitation of the originals, modelled
out of the composition that is used for pottery, baked first in their natural
colour, then coloured when necessary and baked again; coolies, pedlars
[sic]
,
pilgrims in endless variety, less than an inch in height; bridges, lanterns,
torii,
boats, junks, rafts, mills, thatch-roofed cottages -- everything, in fact,
that is necessary in the making of a landscape, down to breakwaters for
the rivers, made like tiny bamboo cages filled with stones, such as exist
at every turn of rivers like the Fuji-kawa. The necessary implements
consisted of chop-sticks, the use of which is an art in itself, a trowel
suggesting a doll's mason's trowel, a tiny flat-iron for smoothing the
surface of the sand, besides diminutive scoops for holding only a few grains
of sand, a pair of enlarged forceps for placing the moss, little fairy
brooms about two inches long to sweep away sand which may have got out
of place, and a sieve of like dimensions to sift white powder for a snow
scene, and, finally, a fine water sprayer to keep the moss damp and fresh.
When the selection of the dish has been
made -- the regulation kind being of white or mottled blue china, in size
twelve inches by eight, or eighteen inches by twelve, about one inch deep -- and
the scene decided upon, damp sifted earth will form the mountains and the
foundations in which the rocks are embedded; the hills are carefully carved
and moulded into perfect shape; crevasses, down which a torrent of white
sand will flow, to represent a river, or a mountain road running through
a gorge of terrific rocks, are marked out. Then will come the firm
planting of the stones, toy temples, houses, or bridges; the position of
the trees is carefully weighed and considered; and last of all comes the
sand -- sand of a deep grey colour for deep water, lighter in colour for
the shallows, yellowish sand for the ground or roads, snow-white granite
chips for water racing down from the mossy mountains or dashing against
the cliffs, coarser shingle for the beach in sea scenes; and the correct
use of all these sands is a history in itself, as all the different coloured
varieties come from the different rivers of Japan, and to use the wrong
sand to represent water or earth would be an unforgiveable crime in the
eye of the master.
To show that great men have turned their
attention to these little toy gardens, no less an artist than the celebrated
Hiroshige, whose colour-prints of the
fifty-three stages
of the journey
on the old Tokaido road, along which the Shoguns, in days gone by, travelled
with all the pomp and state due to their rank, from Kyoto to Yedo, are
well known and prized by all lovers of these prints, evidently considered
these scenes so suited for the making of toy gardens, that he designed
a special book in which the fifty-three views appear as
Hachi-niwa.
The book is now, unfortunately, scarce and difficult to obtain, but I had
the delight of seeing the whole set of views in real life, each in its
little dish. My teacher told me that the first Exhibition of
Hachi-niwa
ever held in Kyoto would take place at the Kyoto Club, where the various
competitors would exhibit different views, and a prize would be awarded,
from votes by ballot, to the best in the collection. Needless to
say, as soon as the doors, or rather the sliding shoji, of the club were
thrown open to the public, I hastened to study these perfect little works
of art. Round three white-matted rooms they stood, each dish on a
low black wood stand a few inches high, raised on a dais only another few
inches from the ground, so that to view them properly it was necessary
to kneel in adoration before them. I was asked to vote for the three
I liked best, and never did I have a greater difficulty in deciding.
At first a view of Kodzu attracted my attention, with its pine-clad cliffs,
deep-indented coast line, stony beach with a moored junk, and stretching
away in the distance an expanse of pale blue sea, in the offing being a
fleet of fishing-boats with sails not more than half an inch in size bellying
in the breeze. This seemed to me perfection; every ripple on the
water was marked in the sand, the crests of the waves white, the shadows
a deep blue, and the reflection of the junk in perfect outline -- a marvel
of neatness and ingenuity. But to the Japanese this did not appeal;
they condemned it for its very perfection; any one, they said, could make
such a scene who had sufficient patience and neat fingers; whereas the
view of Kanaya appealed to them as having something grand and yet simple
in its conception. A river of white sand threaded its way through
the mossy plain, and in the distance stood the little mountain village
nestling at the foot of a range of mountains carved in stone. This
was awarded the prize, and I was glad to think, had been made by my teacher.
Such an exhibition I had expected would be principally visited by women
and children, as I heard that the making of
Hachi-niwa
was a favourite
occupation for the ladies of Tokyo, but here in Kyoto they found interest
in the eyes of the "grave and reverend seigneurs" who gathered in groups
about the rooms. I saw all the members of the club, politicians,
writers, poets, the greatest in the land, engrossed in discussing the merits
or demerits of toy gardens, and I could not help thinking that here was
a country indeed where "small things amuse great minds."
Th[e] practice of disbudding is also
occasionally carried out with old specimens of dwarf plum-trees when it
is considered that a wealth of blossom would hide the growth of the little
tree, which be careful training as after years of patience rewarded the
owner by conforming to the desired shape laid down by the canons of art.
These little trees are in great demand at the close of the year, for hardly
a house in the land is without a tiny tree of
ume, to bring luck
at the opening of another year; so during November and December, when their
pale-pink buds are fast swelling, they are tended with the greatest care,
brought into the sun during the day, plentifully watered at sundown, and
sheltered from all cold winds. Thus they flower sometimes as early
as New Year's Day, to the intense pride and joy of their owners.
The finest pot-grown peach-trees I ever
saw were in China, their gnarled stems looking truly a thousand years old,
their branches trained and bent or merely drooping like a willow, covered
with the clear pink blossoms. The trunks of these fine old trees
may have been three or four feet high; but in Japan it is possible to procure
a little plant for perhaps 25 sen (about sixpence) whose branches are so
tightly packed with blossoms it is impossible to see a trace of even the
bark between them -- a perfect little tree in a delicate green or mottled
blue porcelain pot. I could not help thinking what pleasure such
trees would give in England, but apparently it is only the Japanese who
know the real secret of growing them, the exact shoots to leave and which
to cut away, to ensure this wealth of blossoms. I felt in England my little
peach-tree would only flower here and there, and its beauty would be lost.
The nursery gardens are gay with splendid
specimens of the much-prized dwarf maple-trees, and every lover of these
little trees will have a few plants of
momiji
in his collection.
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