"All the joy of my existence is concentrated around the
pillow which giveth me nightly rest, all the hope of my
days I find in the beauties of Nature that ever please my
eyes."
"Hō-jō-ki" (Trans. by F. V. Dickins).
Japanese and English Gardens
There is nothing particularly æsthetic about the average English garden. When the bedding-out time comes a slow old gardener puts in his plants. Later on we see a crude blaze of colour—scarlet geraniums, yellow calceolarias, blue lobelias, the green grass and the ochre-coloured paths. And this is the colour effect of the average English garden, a colour effect that makes the eyes ache and shames the very flowers so unwisely set in this fashion. The truth of the matter is that we do not understand the art of flower arrangement. We buy flowers just to make the garden look bright, under the impression that brightness is an abstract quality with which we should like to spend our summer days. An Englishman once attempted to make a landscape garden after the Japanese manner. He was extremely proud of the result, and on one occasion he took a Japanese gentleman round to see it. The Japanese gentleman exclaimed, with extreme courtesy: "It is very beautiful; we have nothing at all like it in Japan!" The Englishman failed in his attempt to imitate because he considered gardening a hobby, while in Japan the garden is something indelibly associated with Japanese life itself. In Japan it is an ancient cult to which poets and artists have given years of thought, a cult in which emotion, memory, and religion play their part.
The Love of Flowers, its Growth and Symbolism
One of the most striking, and certainly one of the most pleasing, characteristics of the Japanese is their intense love of flowers and trees. Merry parties set out to see the azaleas bloom, or the splendour of the pink-white cherry-blossom, or the scarlet glory of the maple-trees. This "flower-viewing" is an integral part of their existence. The very kimono of the laughing children look like little gardens of flowers themselves. Take away their landscape, and you take away at once their sense of poetry, and, we may almost add, the floral side of their religion too, for the Japanese worship flowers and trees in a way utterly impossible to the more prosaic Westerner.
During a recent spring the magnolia-trees in Kew Gardens afforded a wonderfully beautiful spectacle. But there were few to see these leafless trees with their profusion of lotus-like blossom. The most appreciative spectator was a child, who sat under the sweet-scented branches, gathered the fallen petals in her little brown hands, and made up a quaint story as she did so. But in Japan, where magnolia-trees bloom too, a hundred little poems would be threaded to the branches, and little cakes made in imitation of the petals. Perhaps, too, a branch of magnolia would be set in a vase, the object of silent admiration of the members of some tea ceremony. And afterwards the spray of blossom would be gently placed on a river or buried with joy and reverence for the beauty it had exhibited in its brief hour of life.
The love of flowers is only a small part of the Japanese love of Nature. There was an evolutionary growth in this worship as in every other, and we are inclined to think that the Japanese go very far back in this matter, and learnt first of all to love rocks and stones. To us rocks and stones are of interest only to the geologist and metallurgist, merely from a scientific point of view, and it seems almost incredible that rocks and stones have a poetical meaning. But it is otherwise to the Japanese. 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. Without a doubt Japanese gardens, with their gorgeous flowers, merry sunshine, and the sweet tinkle of dainty fairy-bells suspended from the branches of the trees, are the most delightful in the world.