Of course, the fate in store for Alpines in England is not of so inevitable a nature as that awaiting Japanese gardening; for in this latter “craze” there is an element scarcely present in Alpine gardening. We can more or less fathom the spirit of Alpine gardening and are therefore quite able to construct something that shall be more or less intelligent and true; but can we say as much for ourselves with regard to Japanese gardening? I think not. I think that largely it is, and must remain, a sealed book to us. Japanese gardening, as Miss Du Cane very truly points out in her Preface to “The Flowers and Gardens of Japan,” is “the most complicated form of gardening in the world.” Who in England will master the “seven schools” and absorb all the philosophy and subtle doctrine which governs them? Who in England will bring himself to see a rock, a pool, a bush as the Japanese gardener sees them, as, indeed, the Japanese people in general see them? The spirit of Japanese gardening is as fundamentally different from the spirit of English gardening as that of Japanese art is from English art. What poor, spiritless results we have when English art assumes the guise of Japanese art! It is imitation limping leagues behind its model. And it is this because it is unthought, unfelt, unrealized.
Strikingly individual, the Japanese outlook is much more impersonal than is ours. Needs must that we be born into the traditions of such a race to comprehend and feel as it does about Nature. A Japanese must have his rocks, streams, trees proportioned to his tea or dwelling house and bearing mystic religious significance. Such particular strictness is the product of ages of upbringing. A few years, a generation or two could not produce in us the reasoned nicety of this phase of appreciation; still less the reading of some book or the visit to some garden built by Japanese hands. The spirit of a race is of far longer weaving; one summer does not make a butterfly;
LAC CHAMPEX in cloudland at the end of May; CALTHA PALUSTRIS and PRIMULA FARINOSA by the water edge.
“... think of all
The suns that go to make one speedwell blue.”
To us a tiny chalet is quite well placed amid stupendous cliffs and huge, tumbled boulders, and is fit example to follow, if only we are able to do so. In Alpine gardening we feel no need to study the size of our rocks in relation to our summer-house, or place them so that they express some high philosophic or mystic principle. We have no cult beyond Nature’s own cult in this matter. We see, and we are content to see, that Nature has no nice plan and yet is invariably admirable; we see, and we are content to see, that if man, as in Switzerland, chooses to plant his insignificant dwelling in the midst of great, disorderly rocks and crowded acres of brilliant blossoms, it is romantic garden enough and worthy of as close imitation as possible.
With the Japanese, gardening is perhaps more a deeply æsthetic culture than it is the culture of plants. Where we are bald, unemotional, “scientific” gardeners, they will soar high into the clouds of philosophic mysticism. Truer children of the Cosmos than we Western materialists, they walk in their gardens as in some religious rite. We, too, no doubt, are often dreamers; we, too, are often wont to find in our gardens expression for our searching inner-consciousness; but how different are our methods, how different the spirit we wish to express.