Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/198

128 man-made gardens seem merely the happy chance effect of wild Nature alone.

On my eventful first visit to Japan I had the lucky opportunity of witnessing the construction of a landscape garden. Everything except the ground itself was put there according to a well-thought-out plan—the rocks, the trees, the shrubs, and even the waterfall; and yet, when I left the place five months later, it was as if it had always been. A sloping hill-side had been chosen (the house, I regret to say, was one of the ugliest specimens of ‘foreign’—that is to say, our mid-Victorian—architecture ever built), and another part of the same grounds had already been completed before I arrived.

First of all, some of the hill was hollowed out to make an irregular valley, or rather gorge, and near the top of this a group of rough blocks of granite was firmly embedded. There is a builder’s rule which was observed by the Greeks, laying down the proportion of an upright column which should be underground; this was, to the best of my recollection, one-sixth of the total length. Those Japanese gardeners did better than that: two-thirds of these great stones were underground, and such close-growing evergreen shrubs and dwarf Azaleas were planted near that it would have taken more severe earthquakes than we had that summer to dislodge them. Then moss and lichens were fastened