The "Hill Garden" class is the more elaborate of the two, and that best adapted for large gardens, and for those where the natural site is undulating, or where money can be spent in artificial grading. The "Hill Garden" has many different species, such, for instance, as the "Rocky-ocean" style, which represents in general an inlet of the sea surrounded by high cliffs, the shores spread with white sea-sand, scattered with sea rocks and grown upon with pine trees trained to look as if bent and distorted with the sea wind; or the "Wide-river" style, showing a spreading stream issuing from behind a hill and running into a lake; or the "Reed-marsh" style, in which the hills are low, rounded sand dunes bordering a heath or moor in which lies a marshy pool overgrown with rushes; and many other such "styles," all well recognized, all carefully discriminated and all modelled upon actual landscapes. In any case, however, the true "Hill Garden" must present, in combination, mountain or hill, and water scenery.
If on the contrary the site be small and flat, and the garden is to be less elaborate, the "Flat" style is usually chosen. The "Flat Garden" is generally supposed to represent either the floor of a mountain valley, a moor, a rural scene, or the like; and as in the case of "Hill Gardens," there are a number of well recognized and classical examples.
Having, then, determined that the garden is to be of one of these types, and having also determined the degree of elaboration with which it is to be treated, the gardener will next proceed to fix the scale upon which it is to be constructed,—and this scale (a most important factor) is decided by the size of the garden area, and the number of features which must be introduced into the scene; for it is clear that if the site be large, and one in which natural hills or large bodies of water are already present, the scale will be a normal one; whereas if a whole valley, with hills, a river, a water-fall, a lake and a wooded slope is to be presented in a space of some fifty or sixty square yards, the scale of the whole must be miniature. But whatever scale is adopted, every tree, every rock, every pool, every accessory detail must be made exactly to correspond to it. A hill that might in a large garden be a natural elevation of considerable size, with full sized trees planted upon it, might in a smaller one modelled after the same design, be only a hillock, planted with dwarfed trees or shrubs; or in a still smaller area become only a clump of thick-leaved bushes trimmed to resemble a hill-shape, or even a large boulder flanked by tiny shrubs. So skilfully and completely do Japanese gardeners carry out any scale that they have determined upon, however, that Mr. Hearn describes a garden of not much above thirty yards square, that when viewed through a window from which the garden alone was visible, seemed to be really an actual and natural landscape seen from a distance,—a perfect illusion.
| PLATE XIV | MERCHANT'S GARDEN, AWOMORI |
Having determined upon the natural model and the scale for it, the gardener will begin by imitating on the given site the main natural land conformations of his original, building hills or grading slopes, excavating lake basins and cutting river channels. These natural features he will next proceed to elaborate, and it is in this process of elaboration that he must most carefully observe all those complex laws and conventions to which we have before alluded.
