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206 may not appear, according to the circumstances of the case. When they do, they are generally grouped together in beds or under shelter, and removed as soon as their season of bloom is over, more after the manner of a European flower-show. In this way are obtained horticultural triumphs, such as are described in the Article on Things Japanese/Flowers. Triumphs of another kind are achieved by dwarfing. Thus you may see a pine-tree or a maple, sixty years old and perfect in every part, but not more than a foot high. Japanese gardeners are also very skilful in transplanting large trees. A judicious treatment of the accessory roots during a couple of years enables massive, aged trees to be removed from place to place, so that a Japanese nouveau riche can raise up anything—even an ancestral park—on whatever spot he fancies.

Japanese landscape-gardening is one of the fine arts. Ever since the middle of the fifteenth century, generations of artists have been busy perfecting it, elaborating and refining over and over again the principles handed down by their predecessors, until it has come to be considered a mystery as well as an art, and is furnished—not to say encumbered—with a vocabulary more complicated and recondite than any one who has not perused some of the native treatises on the subject can well imagine. There is a whole set of names for different sorts of garden lanterns, another for water-basins, another for fences (one authority enumerates nineteen kinds of screen fences alone), another and this is a very important subject—for those large stones, which, according to Japanese ideas, constitute the skeleton of the whole composition.

Then, too, there are rules for every detail; and different schools of the art or science of gardening have rules diametrically opposed to each other. For instance, larger trees are planted and larger hills made by one school in the front portion of a garden, and smaller ones in the further portions, with the object of exaggerating the perspective and thus making the garden look bigger than it really is. Another school teaches the direct contrary. Suggestion is largely used, as when part of a small