Besides the fences, a few of which only have been figured, there are stout, durable walls built up with tile and plaster, or mud intermixed. These structures rest on a foundation of stone, are two or three feet wide at their base, and rise to a height of eight feet or more, at which altitude they may not be over two feet in width, and are crowned with a coping of tiles like a miniature roof-top. The interior of these walls is filled with a rubble of clay and broken tiles, while the outside exhibits an orderly arrangement of tiles in successive layers.
Fig. 262.—Barred opening in a fence.
The large enclosures, or yashikis, are generally surrounded by walls of this nature.
CHAPTER VI. GARDENS.
The Japanese garden, like the house, presents features that never enter into similar places in America. With us it is either modelled after certain French styles, or it is simply beds of flowers in patches or formal plats, or narrow beds bordering the paths; and even these attempts are generally made on large areas only. The smaller gardens seen around our ordinary dwellings are with few exceptions a tangle of bushes, or wretched attempts to crowd as many different kinds of flowers as possible into a given area; and when winter comes, there is nothing left but a harvest of dead stalks and a lot of hideously-designed trellises painted green.
It is no wonder, then, that as our people have gradually become awakened within recent years to some idea of fitness and harmony of color, the conventional flower-bed has been hopelessly abandoned, and now green grass grows over the graves of most of these futile attempts to defy Nature. The grass substitute has at least the merit of not being offensive to the eye, and of requiring but little care save that of the strenuous pushing of the mechanical grass-cutter. This substitute is, however, a confession of inability and ignorance,—as much as if a decorator, after having struggled in vain with his fresco designs upon some ceiling, should give up in disgust and paint the entire surface one color.