GUILD GARDEN AT KIANGPEI.
By Mrs. Archibald Little.
Whilst on March 21st of another year, I wrote at the time:
"The thermometer is now in the sixties. Our plum-trees done flowering; orchids coming on victoriously; tree-tulips and magnolias like big bouquets; and camellias only slowly waning. Probably nowhere could camellias be seen in greater luxuriance than here, where there are endless varieties; and a blossom of a peony-camellia, loose-petalled and very double, on being measured the other day, revealed a circumference of fifteen and a quarter inches. Great branches of judas-tree and pink peach blossom adorn our rooms, together with a bright-yellow flower that grows in great profusion, and that used to be called New Zealand flax. From all this you can fancy how hothouselike our atmosphere feels just now."
Later in the summer the peonies are the great pride of the Chinese; whilst the scarlet dragon-boat flower is, perhaps, the most remarkable of all the Chinese flowers from being all scarlet together. But it is useless to try to enumerate; for the highest authority in Kew Gardens told me once that in no part of the world was there a more abundant and varied flora than in the Ichang Gorges, which are also the land of the butterfly. It is, however, a mistake, I believe, to think China is called the flowery land from the number of its flowers, the Chinese word translated "flowery" meaning also "varicoloured."
V. In the Romantic East at Last!
Mr. Tee San's garden is one of the most fascinating spots in China, with the bright autumn sunshine glinting through the pretty bits of trellis-work on to its fantastic rocks, and zigzag bridges, and pretty pavilions, and lighting up the truly exquisite specimens of chrysanthemums sometimes on show there. There is the spiky little chrysanthemum, the tiger's moustache, and huge maroon blossoms fading off into delicate cream in the centre, and many other uncommon varieties, each in its appropriate pot, spacious, four-square, and creamy, apparently just made to be painted, and each placed at exactly the right elevation by means of its light wooden stand, sometimes raising the pot an inch or two, sometimes about eight feet, and always so slanted, that the flowers are tilted down towards the spectator, thus showing themselves off in their entirety. But it is not so much worth while to go to this garden in order to see the chrysanthemum, as to admire the infinite variety of Chinese decoration crowded into what is really a very confined space, but which is made to appear a garden large enough to lose oneself in. Rows of bamboo stems of soft blue-green china relieve the monotony of the walls, with their open air-spaces in between, as do also various graceful interlacings of tiles. There are doors of all sorts and sizes, like a horseshoe, like a pentagon, like a leaf cut somewhat irregularly down the middle by the leaf stem, and with outer edge fluted like a leaf. There are, of course, artificial mounds made out of rockwork, and grottoes, and quaint lumps of stone, looking as if they had been masses of molten metal suddenly hardened in their grotesqueness; also, as a matter of course, inside the pavilions there are various specimens of that landscape stone—dear to the heart of the Chinaman, and said to come from Yunnan—framed and hanging on the walls. There used to be also a magnificent peacock; a mandarin duck, with its quaint, bright, decisive colouring; golden pheasants; a scarlet-faced monkey, and a pale-faced; a little company of white geese, and another of white rabbits. But to enumerate the treasures of the garden gives no idea of the artistic skill with which it has been laid out; so that every one who sits down in it even in the most commonplace manner, and even those most unpicturesque of human beings, Chinese men and women, immediately becomes an integral part of a picture.
