"Japanese Table Tree" from The Manti Messenger


      "Japanese Table Tree" (1916), the third but non-bylined short article in the section "The Home Beautiful, Flowers and Shrubbery - Their Care and Cultivation" is as follows:

       "There are some curious old trees in Japan that have just the opposite qualities to those which are found in the United States.  Out in our great forest country, when a tree has reached the dignity of 100 years of undisputed residence in any one community, it rears its proud old head and stands as a landmark and a leading citizen of the forest.
       "Japan supplies some very strange specimens that live to be 100 years of age without ever getting off an ordinary table.  They are stunted, gnarled little gnomes of trees, made to dwell all their lives in the prison of a bowl, where water is placed to give a tiny landscape effect and miniature houses are built under the shade of the stunted, miserable [sic] little semblance of a forest giant.
       "In the picture one sees how the Japanese use the dwarfed tree for home decorative effect.  As all things are really relative, the tree preserves its dignity by being as much larger than the miniature house than a real tree would loom above a sure-enough dwelling.
       "But it is a dwarf, nevertheless, and the idea can be used for home or garden decoration when one finds a stunted tree that, like Peter Pan, will never grow up." 1


Japanese Table Tree One Hundred Years Old.



NOTES

1     Manti Messenger (Utah), September 29, 1916, pg. 3.    The character of Peter Pan first appeared in print in a 1902 work, the stage play about him debuted in 1904, and the children's story based on the play was published in 1911.



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