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                          THE BROCHURE SERIES
                           Japanese Gardens
                            FEBRUARY, 1900


[Illustration: PLATE XI      DAIMIO'S GARDEN AT SHINJIKU]




                                  THE
                            BROCHURE SERIES
                    OF ARCHITECTURAL ILLUSTRATION.

                    1900.     FEBRUARY	    No. 2.




                           JAPANESE GARDENS.


The Japanese garden is not a flower garden, neither is it made for
the purpose of cultivating plants. In nine cases out of ten there
is nothing in it resembling a flower-bed. Some gardens may contain
scarcely a sprig of green; some (although these are exceptional) have
nothing green at all and consist entirely of rocks, pebbles and sand.
Neither does the Japanese garden require any fixed allowance of space;
it may cover one or many acres, it may be only ten feet square; it
may, in extreme cases, be much less, and be contained in a curiously
shaped, shallow, carved box set in a veranda, in which are created tiny
hills, microscopic ponds and rivulets spanned by tiny humped bridges,
while queer wee plants represent trees, and curiously formed pebbles
stand for rocks. But on whatever scale, all true Japanese gardening is
landscape gardening; that is to say, it is a living model of an actual
Japanese landscape.

But, though modelled upon an actual landscape, the Japanese garden
is far more than a mere naturalistic imitation. To the artist every
natural view may be said to convey, in its varying aspects, some
particular mental impression or mood, such as the impression of
peacefulness, of wildness, of solitude, or of desolation; and the
Japanese gardener intends not only to present in his model the features
of the veritable landscape, but also to make it express, even more
saliently than the original, a dominant sentimental mood, so that
it may become not only a picture, but a poem. In other words, a
Japanese garden of the best type is, like any true work of art, the
representation of nature as expressed through an individual artistic
temperament.

Through long accumulation of traditional methods, the representation
of natural features in a garden model has come to be a highly
conventional expression, like all Japanese art; and the Japanese garden
bears somewhat the same relation to an actual landscape that a painting
of a view of Fuji-yama by the wonderful Hokusai does to the actual
scene--it is a representation based upon actual and natural forms, but
so modified to accord with accepted canons of Japanese art, so full
of mysterious symbolism only to be understood by the initiated, so
expressed, in a word, in terms of the national artistic conventions,
that it costs the Western mind long study to learn to appreciate its
full beauty and significance. Suppose, to take a specific example,
that in the actual landscape upon which the Japanese gardener chose
to model his design, a pine tree grew upon the side of a hill. Upon
the side of the corresponding artificial hill in his garden he would
therefore plant a pine, but he would not clip and trim its branches
to imitate the shape of the original, but rather, satisfied that by
so placing it he had gone far enough toward the imitation of nature,
he would clip his garden pine to make it correspond, as closely as
circumstances might permit, with a conventional ideal pine tree shape
(such a typical ideal pine tree is shown in the little drawing on
page 25), a shape recognized as the model for a beautiful pine by
the artistic conventions of Japan for centuries, and one familiar to
every Japanese of any pretensions to culture whatsoever. And, as there
are recognized ideal pine tree shapes, there are also ideal mountain
shapes, ideal lake shapes, ideal water-fall shapes, ideal stone shapes,
and innumerable other such ideal shapes.

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