Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/266

176 ‘Crane,’ one the ‘Tortoise’), the wooden bridge, which is ingenuously named ‘The Bridge of Heaven’; and, what I most delighted in, the ‘Moon-gazing Platform,’ which the great Hideyoshi had sat upon at Fushimi, whence it was brought to adorn this garden. Here are Irises, as Mr. Tyndale shows in the Buddhist temple gardens facing this and ; and Azaleas, whose blood-red bloom, just going off, was pale rose colour when I was there last, in June. There the Plum shows only one tree, but the Cherry takes its place. The October Maples are magnificent. The autumn, too, brings a wealth of Kiku flowers, for the old priest showed me many pots of Chrysanthemums, which he was tending and bringing on, with a spiny framework of bamboo training each spray, in just the same way as my gardener did at Hong-Kong.

The Choin-in Temple grounds, in Kyoto, are on a grander scale, and so the intimate loveliness of the smaller garden would not have been appropriate to it, although there are bits to cuddle to one’s heart, as the accompanying picture shows. Murray says that it spreads over sixty acres. I must take his word for it, as figures mean nothing to my non-mathematical brain. I only know that, when we had climbed to the top of that interminable flight of stone steps, we were so breathless that we would have believed anything concerning its size and the height of the great hill which was levelled for